An Analysis Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In Junior High School Students' English Writings

English writing is an important part of junior high school English examination,which has always been the key point of junior high school English teaching.The requirements of Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standards(2011)for junior high school students' English writing are as follows: Junior high school students should be able to collect and prepare the materials according to their writing requirements;draft the texts independently;modify these texts under the guidance of the teachers and use common conjunctions to express logical relationship.Therefore,writing is very significant for junior high school students and cohesive devices play a vital role in writing.Appropriate use of cohesive devices in junior high school students' writings could reduce the problems that may appear in the writing process and improve effectively students' writing abilities.At present,the study of cohesive devices in English writing mainly focuses on writing teaching at home and abroad,and most of research subjects are college students.However,there are few studies on the practical use of cohesive devices in junior high school students' English writings.Based on cohesion theory and error analysis theory,the author studies the use of cohesive devices in junior high school students' English writing and the existing errors and analyzes the causes for these errors.These research questions are included in the following:(1)What types of cohesive devices do junior high school students frequently use in their English writings?(2)What are the errors in using cohesive devices in their English writings?(3)What are the possible causes for the errors in using cohesive devices in their English writings? The research steps are as follows:(1)The students of two classes of Grade Nine of the affiliated middle school of Henan Polytechnic University are selected as the research subjects.The data is to collect 84 compositions of the students in these two classes from the test in November,2017;(2)The errors in using cohesive devices are identified,classified and counted;(3)Four teachers in Grade Nine and twelve students in two classes are interviewed in December,2017,which try to find out the causes for the errors in using cohesive devices in their writings.The result indicates that junior high school students frequently use reference and conjunction in grammatical cohesion and repetition and collocation in lexical cohesion in English writing.Their cohesiveerrors are mainly repetition and collocation in lexical cohesion and conjunction and reference in grammatical cohesion.These cohesive errors are possibly caused by the interference of mother tongue,the influence of certain psychological factors and the lack of writing practice.The implication of this study is that the teachers should make full use of teaching materials,change teaching methods and increase students' language input and output so as to improve students' writing abilities.