A Study On The Correlation Between Cohesive Devices And Composition Quality In Junior High School Students' English Compositions

English writing can test students' comprehensive ability to use English.It can not only show students' mastery of basic English knowledge,but also show their logic and coherence of thinking,which is an important output process in English learning.Cohesion is an important part of a text,which makes it coherent.The importance of cohesion to discourse has attracted the attention of many experts and scholars at home and abroad.There are different views on the relationship between cohesive devices and composition quality,and most of the studies take English majors,non-English majors and senior high school students as the research objects,and pay less attention to the English learners in junior high schools and primary schools.Therefore,based on the cohesion theory of Halliday&Hasan,this paper investigates 126 students from three classes of Grade 3 in a school in Dazhou City,Sichuan Province.Based on the analysis of the 126 students' compositions and Questionnaire to them,this study aims to answer the following three questions: 1)What is the overall situation of using cohesive devices in English compositions of junior high school students? 2)What is the using status of cohesive devices in high-score composition group and low-score composition group? 3)What is the relationship between cohesive devices used in English composition and the quality of composition?The author collected the English compositions of three classes in Grade 3 of a foreign language school in Dazhou City in the mid-term test of the first semester of the 2019 academic year.Apart from the compositions with 0 score,the author divided 34 compositions into high-score group and 35 compositions into low-score group according to Qin Xiaoqin's method of determining the high-score group and low-score group,making a total of 69 compositions.The author also conducted a questionnaire survey on the students in these three classes to learn their attitude towards the English composition,their understanding of the cohesive devices and the teachers' attitude towards the cohesive devices in daily teaching.Data collected was processed by SPSS 23.0,Excel,Text Processor,TagAnt1.2.0 and AntConc3.5.7.Through Kendall's concordant coefficient test,independent sample T test,Pearson's correlation coefficient analysis and descriptive statistical analysis,the following conclusions are drawn in this study: 1)The number of grammatical cohesive devices is far greater than that of lexical cohesive devices,and reference and conjunction play a major role in grammatical cohesive devices.In lexical cohesion,the number of antonymy is used more than the complementary relation.2)The use of cohesive devices in the high-score group is more than that in the low-score group.Except reiteration,substitution and ellipsis,the number of other cohesive devices is significantly different between the high-and low-score groups.3)The number of personal reference,repetition and general word is lower in the high-score group than in the low-score group.4)Among grammatical cohesive devices,reference and conjunction show a medium correlation with writing quality;ellipsis and substitution have a slight correlation with writing quality.Among lexical cohesive devices,collocation has a significant correlation with writing quality,and reiteration shows no correlation with writing quality.