A Study On Lexical Cohesion In Different Genres Of English Writing Of Chinese Senior High School Students

Writing is considered to be a very important component of language skills.It is a kind of comprehensive usage of English knowledge.Therefore writing can reflect learners’ overall language competence to a large extent.For senior high school students,to master English writing skill needs not only the knowledge of spelling,punctuation,grammar and vocabulary but also the knowledge of discourse and coherence.One of the differences between text and non-text is that a text has texture.And texture is realized by cohesion.Lexical cohesion is one of the main types of cohesion;therefore,it plays a vital role in discourse coherence.Based on Halliday&Hasan and Hoey’s classification,lexical cohesion is divided into seven types in this study.They are:simple lexical repetition,complex lexical repetition,synonymy,antonymy,hyponymy,general words and collocation.The research is intended to discuss the following questions:(1)What are the characteristics of the high score group students and low sore group students in using lexical cohesion devices in narration,argumentation and exposition?(2)What’s the difference between the two groups of students in using lexical cohesion devices?(3)Which kind of lexical cohesion devices is most closely related to writing quality?The corpora are collected from two classes in Grade Three of Fuzhou Overseas Chinese Middle School.Then the author uses EXCEL and SPSS(17.0)to analyze the data.The results show that,both of the two groups use a large number of collocations and simple lexical repetitions,and hyponymy is rarely used.In the aspect of the total number of seven types of cohesion devices usage,the high score group overwhelms the low score group.However,the frequency of each kind of cohesion device used in the two groups are not the same.The low score group students use simple lexical repetition more frequently than the high score group,indicating that the low score group students tend to use simple lexical repetition when choosing lexical cohesion device.And in the aspect of the correlation,complex lexical repetition,synonym and collocation are closely related to writing quality in narration.And simple lexical repetition,complex lexical repetition,synonymy,antonymy,hyponymy and collocation are closely related to writing quality in argumentation.In exposition,the most closely related one is collocation,and then synonymy and simple lexical repetition.Collocation is most closely related to writing quality in all the three types’ compositions.