A Coh-metrix Analysis Of Cohesion In Chinese English Majors’ Academic Writing

Academic writing is an important indicator of students’ academic proficiency and research competences.Nowadays,Chinese students’ academic writing suffers to a large extent such problems as unclear logical relations,ambiguous semantic meaning,etc.These problems are mainly caused by a lack of cohesion in writing.Therefore,this research aims to analyze the cohesion in Chinese English majors’ academic writing based on a self-built L2 corpus with a corpus of native writers as a reference.The corpora include 60 Chinese learners’ graduation theses and 50 international journal papers.The Corpus of Chinese English majors’ academic writing has1,260,279 tokens,and was collected from five domestic universities,including 20 graduate theses,20 postgraduate theses and 20 doctoral theses.The Corpus of native English writers’ journal papers has 371,130 tokens,and was collected from 6 SSCI indexed journals.With a revised framework on Halliday and Hasan(1976)and Zhang(2005)’s cohesion theory,the analysis of cohesion in academic writing is conducted from three aspects: conjunction,lexical reiteration and semantic consistency together with the help of the automated text analysis tool Coh-Metrix and SPSS 22.0.The data show that:(1)In general,Chinese English majors tend to use lexical cohesion rather than grammatical ones;(2)In the use of conjunctions,Chinese English majors have a similar preference in the choice of conjunction types,though the frequency is less than that of native English writers.Meanwhile,there is huge inadequacy in the use of adversative,logical and temporal conjunctions while the difference in the use of causal conjunction is not distinct;(3)In terms of lexical reiterations,there is no huge difference in the overall reiterations between Chinese English majors and native writers.Chinese English majors only have a higher proportion in content word overlap,which indicates the overuse of content word andshort sentence length.(4)In terms of semantic consistency,Chinese English majors have a much higher semantic consistency within paragraphs,especially in doctoral theses.Although it shows the close connections between sentences,it reflects that the content within the texts lacks diversification and learners’ limitation in vocabulary and expressions.The present study has some theoretical and empirical implications.It explores the features of cohesion in Chinese English majors’ academic writing from different aspects and helps broaden the study of cohesion theoretically.Meanwhile,the research findings may contribute to the teaching of academic writing and be useful for the compilation of teaching materials.