An Empirical Study On The Errors Of Cohesion And Coherence In College English Composition

Writing plays a very important role in English language teaching.However,a variety of errors committed by college students are very common in English writing,especially on the cohesion and coherence errors.On the basis of Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion and coherence,this paper aims to analyze the cohesion and coherence errors in college students' English writings.The sample writings are collected from 73 college students(from Tianjin Polytechnic University)who take part in the 2017 Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press(Beijing,China)English Writing Contest.Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis,the number of cohesion and coherence errors in college students' English writing is calculated,and these errors are also analyzed.At the same time,through the comparison of the frequency of cohesion and coherence errors,the difference between English majors and Non-English majors is presented.In addition,in terms of high-score learner group and low-score learner group,the comparison of the frequency of cohesion and coherence errors is discussed,which is designed to analyze the relationship between the frequency of cohesion and coherence errors and the quality of English writing.It is expected that the analysis will offer some pedagogical implications in English language teaching.The findings show that the students have difficulty in using cohesion devices and keeping coherence in the compositions.Therefore,it is suggested that the teachers apart from introducing the knowledge of grammar,are to emphasize the knowledge of cohesion and coherence and increase the number of those exercises to achieve cohesion and coherence at different levels.