A Study On The Use Of Conjunctions In Senior High School Students' English Composition Writing

Since the theory of discourse function was put forward by Halliday and Hasan in 1976,it has attracted the attention of the majority of linguists.Therefore,linguistic researchers tend to apply discourse theory to discourse analysis.Being one of the components of discourse function,cohesion theory has aroused great interest among lots of domestic and foreign scholars.As one of the cohesive devices,the main function of conjunctions is to connect different components in discourse and play a coherent role in discourse,reflecting the logical and semantic relationship between contexts.In the current English writing teaching,teachers focus almost on the language knowledge and other aspects,ignoring the importance of the discourse awareness.As a result,the sentences written by most high school students in the article are incoherent,and the reasonable use of English cohesion method is to solve this problem.In other words,the reasonable use of conjunctions is the solution to the problem.Through the analysis of previous studies,their research on conjunctions are mostly focused on the university level.There is relatively little research on the use of conjunctions in high school students' in English writing teaching.Therefore,it is very necessary to further study on this.This study aims to analyze the use of conjunctions in English writing teaching of high school students through the questionnaire of 130 students from two classes in the first grade of experimental high school in Yan'an city.The questionnaire contains a total of 20 questions and it mainly investigates the use of conjunctions in high school students' English writing from three aspects,1)the attention of high school students to conjunctions in English writing,2)the mastery of high school students of the basic meaning and usage of conjunctions,and 3)the attention of the English teachers to conjunctions.The survey results show that high school students can consciously use conjunctions and attach more importance to conjunctions.They can also master the basic meaning and usage of conjunctions.However,in the actual writing,it is not reasonable to use conjunctions to enhance the coherence of the articles,resulting in the quality of the articles is relatively poor.The study collects 100 essays from two classes.Through analysis,senior high school students had a high frequency of use of conjunctions in composition,especially for additive conjunctions.They tend to overuse simple conjunctions,so they can not be used evenly.In addition,as for the difference between frequency and type of conjunctions in high-level and low-level group,the analysis of tables and independent sample T tests show that there is a significant difference in the frequency and type of conjunctions between high-level and low-level group.The students of high-level group has higher classifications and frequency than those in the low-level group.The above research findings indicate the main problem of high school students is that they can not use conjunctions reasonably and effectively.Their logical thinking is confusing and their essay structure is not clear.In response to these problems,the study will propose teaching strategies and suggestions for cultivating high school students' awareness of using conjunctions,aiming to effectively improve the use of conjunctions by senior high school students,and hope to further improve overall English writing for senior high school students.