A Study On The Application Of Lexical Cohesive Devices To Junior High School Students' English Writings

English curriculum standard requires middle school students to develop four basic skills: listening,speaking,reading and writing.Writing is a comprehensive application of the language.Students have to make efforts to make improvements in it,because it is the most demanding for students and most students are poor in it.Therefore,English writing draws many researchers' attention.Many researchers have made studies on cohesion of sentences.Cohesion is important for making coherent sentences,because cohesion is also the basis of coherence.Coherence is the basic attribute of a text.So lexical cohesion plays an irreplaceable role in the coherence of text.Many scholars have made experiments with the use of lexical cohesion,but the subjects are mostly college students and high school students.So it is of far-reaching significance to analyze the use of lexical cohesive devices in the compositions of junior high school students.The classification of lexical cohesive devices by Halliday and Hasan is taken as a theoretical foundation.This thesis is to study the application of lexical cohesive devices to junior high school students' English writings.This thesis aims to answer the following threequestions:1.What is the current situation of the use of lexical cohesive devices in junior high school students' English writings?2.To what extent,are the lexical cohesive devices related to junior high school students' writing achievements?3.Can junior high school students improve their writing achievements through the learning of lexical cohesive devices?In this study,those selected as the research objects were students coming from Grade Two of Yun Kang Middle School in Yuncheng City,Shanxi Province.The study adopts the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis,which consists of questionnaire and test.Totally 114 questionnaires were distributed to students in Class 188 and Class 189 of Grade Two in this school to investigate the current situation of lexical devices in English writings.The necessary data was obtained from the114 students' compositions written for the mid-term exam.Through the analysis of the data,the author got the frequency of the use of each type of lexical cohesive device by using Excel.Pretest and post-test were made to compare the students' writing achievements.SPSS software is utilized to make statistics and analysis.The study indicates: Firstly,in terms of the number of the use of lexical cohesion,a large number of lexical cohesive devices are used instudents' compositions.In terms of the distribution of lexical cohesive devices,repetition and general words are more frequently used,while synonyms,antonyms and hyponyms are seldom used;Secondly,among these five devices,the synonyms,antonyms and hyponyms are closely related to the composition score.The synonyms has the highest correlation with the composition,followed by antonyms and hyponyms.However,the repetition and general word have little to do with the achievement of the composition;Thirdly,students' writing achievements have been improved through the systematic study of lexical cohesive devices.To some extent,this study can enrich the research on the application of lexical cohesive devices in English writing teaching of junior middle school.It can also present a practical method for the improvements of junior high school students' English writing ability through the application of more lexical cohesive devices in their writings.