A Comparative Study Of The Use Of Cohesive Devices In High School Students’ English Writing And Advance With English

The proper and correct use of cohesive devices has a significant impact on writing quality and writing is one of the most important parts of English teaching and learning in high school.The purpose of this study is to explore the distribution and use of cohesive devices in the major reading passages from Advance with English and those in high school students’ compositions under the stressful testing environment with the following two questions: 1)Compared with the use of cohesive devices in Advance with English,what are the general characteristics of high school students’ use of cohesive devices in their writing? 2)Compared with the use of cohesive devices in Advance with English,what are the general problems of the use of cohesive devices in high school students’ writing? And what factors lead to the problems?In the current thesis,the author selects 15 master reading passages from the textbook Advance with English and collects 150 compositions written by senior two students from No.1 Middle School of Hunan Province from the writing part of three monthly examinations.Based on Halliday and Hasan’s(1976)theory of cohesion,the author studies the use of cohesive devices in the two types of language materials both from function and distance with the aid of contrastive interlanguage analysis and error analysis.By way of calculating the frequency of cohesive devices and through statistical analysis,the major findings in the present study may be summarized as follows:1.(1)The study reveals that in general high school students’ compositions enjoy a higher frequency in the use of cohesive devices than Advance with English reading passages.In senior school students’ writing,lexical cohesion is most frequently utilized,which is followed by reference and conjunction,but substitution and ellipsis are seldom used.Comparatively,in Advance with English reading passages,reference are most frequently employed,followed by lexical cohesion and conjunction,and ellipsis and substitution are also used to some extent.(2)With regard to using the sub-types of cohesive devices,senior school students excessively use personal reference and frequently employ repetition,which indicates the deficiency of vocabulary of senior school students.And they tend to use more additive and causal conjunction but less temporal conjunction.However,Advance with English reading passages employ personals and demonstratives more evenly.And more lexical cohesion is used in the reading passages than in the students’ compositions.More synonyms,superordinates and general words are utilized in the reading passages to avoid repetition.Besides,additive and adversative conjunctions are most frequently used in the text passages and temporal conjunctions are also better used in them.(3)In terms of the tie distance,students use immediate devices most frequently in their writing,followed by remote,while mediated and mediated-remote devices are least utilized.The result demonstrates that,due to a lower language proficiency,high school students tend to extend their ideas between adjacent sentences rather than across successive sentences.Whereas,lexical cohesion,remote and mediated-remote devices are used most in the Advance with English passages.2.Compared with the use of cohesive devices in the Advance with English passages,it’s worth noting that high school students:(1)overuse the subtype repetition of lexical cohesion,the subtype personal reference of reference as well as the subtypes additive and causal of conjunction;(2)underuse three subcategories of lexical cohesion(synonym,superordinate and general word),two subtypes of conjunction(adversative and temporal)along with ellipsis and substitution;(3)misuse personal reference and the adversative conjunction “although/though...but”and the causal conjunction “because/as...so”.3.Negative transfer of mother tongue plays a significance part in all the“overuse”,“underuse” and “misuse” of cohesive devices in students’ writing.Other factors like students’ lack of vocabulary,overgeneralization of the rule,overemphasis by the teachers,and excessive and intentional use by the students also attribute to the“overuse”.The “underuse” can also result from students’ lack of vocabulary and grammar knowledge,low awareness of use,using avoidance strategy,the stressful testing environment and paying no attention to text reading.And the “misuse” of personal reference and the adversative conjunction “although/though...but” and the causal conjunction “because/as...so” is mostly caused by negative transfer of mother tongue.The major findings of the present study suggest that cohesive devices are of great significance in the organization of an article,which directly affect the fluency,beauty and quality of writing.Since a rich variety of cohesive devices are appropriately and flexibly used in the Advance with English passages,senior school teachers and students should make full use of the major reading passages in the textbook by careful reading,reciting and imitating.Meanwhile,teachers should pay great attention to the instruction of the knowledge of cohesive devices,and make up a large amount of exercises to raise the students’ awareness of correct and appropriate use of cohesive devices.And the students need to have a good command of various uses of cohesive devices,increase their vocabulary and attempt to enhance their writing quality by reading and reciting classic works.