A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices In Argumentative Essays

In the process of English learning,writing is regarded as an important criterion to measure whether English learners have comprehensive language skills.Writing can clearly indicate students’ ability to express their own ideas with their English knowledge and accurately reflect their English thinking ability and language expression ability.English writing can also help students improve their accuracy in the usage of English.Argumentative writing is the focus of college English writing courses in China.It is also the focus of the examinations at home and abroad,such as CET-4,CET-6,TEM-4,TEM-8,TOELF,ITLTS,etc.Therefore,improving the quality of students’ argumentative writing is an important goal of instructed English teaching and learning in China.Cohesion,as an essential part of English writing,can make an article clear and easy to understand.The correct use of cohesive devices also plays an important role in English writing.Since the publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976,a variety of scholars have paid persistent attention to cohesion theory.According to Halliday and Hasan’s classification,cohesive devices in English can be divided into grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices.Grammatical cohesive devices can be further divided into reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction.This paper takes the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hassan as the theoretical basis and grammatical cohesion as the framework of research.It aims to research the use and usage preference of four grammatical cohesive devices by Chinese college students and English native college students and to explain the possible reasons for these differencesThis paper takes the LOCNESS as the native language corpus of English and the WECCL 2.0 as the learner corpus,from which 100 argumentation papers with similar writing topics are extracted to form two sub-corpora.The corpus retrieval software Antconc 3.5.8 was used to retrieve the usage of various grammatical cohesive devices in the two corpora,and the collected data were checked by Chi-Square Calculator.The results show that among the two corpora,reference is the most frequently used grammatical cohesive device,and conjunction ranks the second.Substitution and ellipsis are seldom used by Chinese college students and English native college students.In terms of personal reference,Chinese college students use "I","you","we","they","it" and some other personal references more significantly than English native college students;they prefer to use "we" instead of "I" when expressing personal opinions;the frequency of using "it" as a formal subject is significantly lower than that of English native college students;and use demonstrative reference"the" and "that" significantly less than English native college students.In terms of conjunction,Chinese college students use "and","besides","what’s more","but","actually","so","because","firstly/at first","secondly" and "thirdly" obviously more than English native college students,and the use of adversative conjunction "yet" is obviously less than English native college students.There is no significant difference between the substitution and ellipsis.A case analysis of the cohesive devices that caused the differences found that Chinese college students did not have a comprehensive understanding of grammatical cohesive devices and lack of register awareness.Negative mother tongue transfer and culture differences also have an impact on these differences.In this paper,it is of certain theoretical significance to make a microscopic study on the previous research on cohesive devices.In addition,this paper has practical significance for Chinese college students and college English teachers.Teachers can use the results of this paper to correct the abuse and misuse of grammatical cohesive devices and guide students to practice grammatical cohesive devices in argumentative papers.For Chinese college students,they can summarize their use of grammatical cohesive devices and improve their writing quality.