A Survey On The Use Of Connectives In English Compositions Of Students In Senior High School

Since the implementation of National English Curriculum Standards for General High Schools(2017 edition),the importance of discourse teaching has been emphasized again.Cohesion,as an important attribute of English discourse,directly affects the quality of English writing.Cohesive devices can combine countless scattered sentences into a logical organism,which can train students’ logical thinking,enhance their discourse awareness and writing ability.Cohesivedevices include grammatical cohesion,lexical cohesion and connective cohesion.Connectives,as a means of explicit bonding,can best highlight the logical relationship behind the discourse and reflect the students’ ability of layout and discourse awareness.However,in the actual writing teaching,teachers and students pursue too much expressions of advanced sentence patterns and accurate grammarand ignore the use of connectives,resulting in the poor coherence and integrity of the article itself.In view of this,based on discourse cohesion and coherence theory and the theory of error analysis,the author analyzes 300 pieces of compositions,including150 pieces ofargumentative compositionsand 150 pieces of practical compositions.The research questions are as follows: 1.What are the general characteristics of the usage of connectives in compositions of different genres? 2.What are the similarities and differences of the usage of connectives between high-level group and low-level group?3.What are the problems in the application of connectives in English writing of high school students and the influencing factors that contribute to these problems?The survey results show that: 1)a large number of connectives in compositionsof both genres are used,which indicates that most students have the basic awareness and ability of using connectives;the distribution of connectives in nine categories is uneven;writing genre affects the distribution of connectives.2)the high group and the low group are similar in the distribution of connectives.For each type of connectives,the most frequently used connectives are almost the same,which means that most students tend to use the most familiar and simple connectives.There are differences in the number and types of connectives used by the two groups,but the difference in the number is not significant.The biggest difference is that the types of connectives used by high group are more abundant,but only compared with low group.3)The typical problems are mainly absence of connectives,excessive use of high frequency connectives,misuse of connectives and unbalanced use of connectives.The misuse of connectives is further divided into logical confusion,overgeneralization and grammatical errors caused by the use of connectives.4)the factors affecting the incorrect use of connectives: the influence of Chinese thinking;students’ weak discourse awareness andlogical thinking;teacher’s guidance to connectives is not systematic and comprehensive;teachers lack attention and evaluation to the incorrect and improper use of connectives during the process of feedback on students’ compositions.According to the above results,some teaching suggestions are put forward:focus on improving students’ logical thinking ability and the sensitivity of connectives;consciously teach the relevant knowledge of connectives in reading or writing;encourage students to use different types of connectives to enrich writing vocabularyand focus on the students in low level;attach importance to the typical problems of use of connectives and cultivate students’ awareness of summarizing mistakes and reasons in their compositions.