A Study Of The Use Of Lexical Cohesive Devices In English Writings By Chinese Senior High School Students

English writing is an important part in College English Entrance Examination,and it has been found,by both teachers and students,to be one of the most important and difficult parts in EFL teaching.English writing is an effective way to demonstrate students' ability to express their ideas in English.However,in practice,writing still remains to be one of the most difficult skills for students to master.Cohesion,which is one significant part of a text,plays a great role in the process of creating text coherence.Lexical cohesion,one of the major kinds of cohesion,makes great contributions to the forming of multiple relationships in creating texture.To many teachers,the teaching of lexical cohesive devices is often the center of EFL writing classes.Since Cohesion in English written by Halliday&Hasan came out in 1976,an increasing number of linguists have applied it to discourse analysis.This study,in light of the combination of the taxonomy of lexical cohesion proposed by Halliday,Hasan and Hoey,intends to answer the following three questions.First,what are the general characteristics concerning the use of lexical cohesive devices in English writing by high school students? Second,are there differences regarding the use of cohesive ties between high-level group and low-level group? If there are,what are they? Third,is there any relationship between the use of lexical cohesive ties and the grades of high school English writing? If there is,what is it?120 compositions written by Senior Grade Two students from a school in Wuxi were chosen as the samples of this study.These compositions were selected from their final-term examination in the second semester.They were assessed by three qualified and experienced teachers.Then the best 30 of the compositions were taken as high-level group and the last 30 of them as low-level group.Quantitative methods was employed to analyze the data in the present study.Independent Sample T-tests were also adopted to get the statistical analyses of the differences between the two groups concerning the use of lexical cohesive ties.Meanwhile,to get the statistical analyses of the relationship between the use of lexical cohesive devices and writing quality,correlations were also conducted.From the data collected,it is found that students tend to use repetitions,including both simple repetitions and complex repetitions,in their English writing.This shows,to a certain extent,students' lack of vocabulary and flexibility respecting the use of cohesive devices.Besides,it has been shown that high-level students prefer to use more cohesive ties than low-level students.And they outperform the low-level group in both variety and flexibility.On the whole,high school students tend to use a lot of simple repetitions in their composition,though simple repetitions are not closely related to the grades of their English writing.Finally,of all the five lexical cohesive devices this thesis focuses on,synonym and antonym are closely related to the grades of high school students' English writing.