A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices Use In English Writing By Chinese And American High School Students

Based on two self-constructed corpora CHSSE(Chinese High School Students' Essays)and AHSSE(American High School Students' Essays),and Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory,this thesis endeavors to explore the distributions of grammatical cohesion in English writing by Chinese and American high school students.The author carries out the study on four levels: reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction,aiming to find out the similarities and differences in the use of grammatical cohesive devices in the two corpora and the problems encountered by students in using these grammatical cohesive devices.Furthermore,this thesis brings forward some suggestions for related English teachers to better teach grammatical cohesive devices and further enhance students' writing ability.The results show that in students' writing,both similarities and differences can be found out between Chinese high school students and American high school students.Firstly,Chinese and American students show a high degree of similarity in choosing and ranking grammatical cohesive devices;secondly,substitution and ellipsis barely occur in both two corpora;thirdly,both groups tend to use concise and simple conjunctions to connect sentences;most of the conjunctive expressions are absent in students' writing.As for differences,for one thing,nine reference words show significant differences,including “I”,“my”,“you”,“she”,“them”,“the”,“this” “that” and “identical(ly)”;For another,four items show great differences in conjunction,namely “as well”,“also”,“before”,“until”.Further analysis reveals that although Chinese students have mastered and are able to apply the most basic and critical grammatical cohesive devices in their writing,some problems in the use of grammatical devices can still be explored.For Chinese high school students,these inappropriate uses include shifting problem in using pronouns,misuse of some grammatical cohesive devices due to L1 transfer influence and misapplication of conjunctions without comprehending their internal logical meaning.While the problem faced by American high school students involves a tendency of colloquial style that leads to the abuse of grammatical cohesive devices.On the basis of the above findings,English teachers are supposed to adopt different teaching strategies to help students reduce the inappropriate use of grammatical cohesive devices and better apply them in their writing,such as providing pluralistic words and synonyms,explaining the differences between Chinese and English connotations of cohesive words to the students in the teaching process,adopting image or English interpretation to instruct grammatical cohesive items as much as possible and so on.