A Study On The Use Of Cohesive Devices In EFL Writing By Senior High School Students Based On Cohesion Theory

Cohesion is an important linguistic feature of written text and a salient dimension of pragmatic competence.National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017 Edition,2020 Revised)emphasizes that students use cohesive devices to achieve textual cohesion and coherence.Simultaneously,different EFL proficient students may have changing features in their uses of cohesive devices.Therefore,it is of great necessity and value to explore the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality,delineate the variation of cohesive patterns and cohesive errors in students’ compositions at different proficiency levels,and investigate students’ awareness of using cohesion,thereby carrying out targeted teaching to accurately improve students’ ability of cohesion and overall writing quality.The thesis reviewed cohesion theory and defined key concepts,such as cohesion,cohesive devices and cohesive errors.Grounded on Halliday and Hassan’s cohesion theory,the author intended to investigate and portray the cohesive devices used by Chinese senior high school students which were specifically addressed as the following research questions:(1)What is the relationship between the writing quality and the cohesive devices used by senior high school students?(2)What are the disparities and similarities,if any,between senior high school students across different proficiency levels in terms of using cohesive devices and committing cohesive errors in their writings?(3)What are the senior high school students’ attitude and awareness of using cohesive devices in their writings?To address the aforementioned research questions,this study adopted mixed research methods.Specifically,literature analysis was used to summarize relevant research at home and abroad.At the main stage of the research,this study conducted the related study on senior high school students in Hangzhou.The research data were collected by writing test,questionnaire,and then analyzed via Statistic Package for Social Science(SPSS 23).The study found that:(1)Prominently positive relations are identified between the writing quality and the use of conjunction,lexical cohesion,comparative reference,temporal conjunction,additive conjunction,synonym as well as antonym.(2)Participated students at different proficiency levels have disparities in using conjunction,lexical cohesion and some subsets of cohesive devices,but resemble in the frequent use of reference and repletion with monotonous repetitions of conjunctions.Reference error is the most typical cohesive error at both proficiency levels.(3)Most participated students have realized the salience of cohesive devices in their writings,but their awareness of achieving cohesion at paragraph level is relatively weak.Many students find it difficult to deploy cohesive devices contextually and appropriately.Based on the above findings,this study puts forward the following implications:(1)Teachers are recommended to set different attentional foci with regard to different cohesive devices and design writing tasks to emphatically cultivate certain cohesive devices.(2)Teachers are supposed to focus on students’ changing features in using cohesive devices as well as committing cohesive errors at different proficiency levels,thereby implementing hierarchical teaching in a targeted manner and providing detailed feedback on students’ writings.(3)In addition,teachers should guide students to discriminate the differences in cohesive patterns between two languages and focus on textual organization,so as to promote their ability of deploying cohesive devices and entrench their awareness of cohesion.