A Study On The Use Of Cohesive Devices Of Senior High Students' English Writings

English writing is an important part in communication,which has demanding requirements for students' comprehensive ability of employing English.Nowadays,the National English Curriculum Standards for Common Senior High School puts forward higher requirements for English writing and pay more attention to cohesion and coherence.However,senior high students are faced with many questions: on one hand,English teachers focus less on the use of cohesive devices,so the teaching related to cohesive devices is rather rare;on the other hand,students take advanced vocabulary and complex clause as the key to deciding a high-quality composition and ignore the use of cohesive devices.Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan has always been considered as the birth of cohesion theory,whose classification of cohesive devices has been taken as the most authoritative one.Cohesive devices refer to those vocabularies and phrases that connect the sentences or items together,the use of cohesive devices is the main point to make a coherent discourse,which makes an demanding requirement for English writing.Therefore,this study analyzes English writings by senior high students on the basis of Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion and coherence for sake of helping teachers and students to understand the importance of cohesive devices used in English writings and in this way,the writing quality and level of students can get improved through the analysis of the current situation of the use of cohesive devices and whether there is any relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality.This thesisis designed to address the following three questions:(1)What are the characteristics of cohesive devices used in English writings by senior high school students?(2)What are the main problems of the use of cohesive devices in English writings by senior high school students?(3)What is the correlation between the use of cohesive devices and the quality of English writing?The author chooses to conduct a research in Jiang Su Taizhou High School,150 senior three students from three classes are selected as participants,their compositions are written in the diagnostic examination at the end of the first month of the new semester are taken as examples.With the help of SPSS 20.0,quantitative and qualitative method are adopted.The research finds out that there are both similarities and differences in senior high school students' use of cohesive devices in English writing.First of all,there are differences of the frequency of different cohesive devices used in English writing,reference,lexical cohesion and conjunction are most frequently adopted in sample writings while substitution and ellipsis are quite less employed.Then,because of lack of the knowledge of cohesive devices,cohesive devices that students can use with intention are relatively little,students incline to adopt those cohesive devices that they are quite familiar with and sure no mistake will be made in limited time.And most mistakes and errors are related to negative transfer of mother tongue and lack of the knowledge of cohesion.Furthermore,there is correlation between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality,but not all devices have relationship with writing quality,only conjunction and lexical cohesion do.The author hopes this research can help teachers and students in senior high school understand the important role that cohesive devices play in English writing,and provide some implications for teachers in improving the coherence of English writing.