An Empirical Study of Cohesion in Senior High Students’ TOEFL Independent Writing文献综述

 2022-08-19 09:42:17

An Empirical Study of Cohesion in Senior High Studentsrsquo; TOEFL Independent Writing

摘要：In order to explore how Chinese students connect ideas in English writing, this empirical study employs a quantitative analysis of cohesive devices used by Chinese senior high students in their TOEFL independent writings. The analyses are carried out on compositions written by 30 Chinese English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) senior two students in Hangzhou High School International Division. Each student is required to finish an argumentative composition in The Independent Writing Task of TOEFL writing. The goal is to investigate and analyze the application of cohesion among Chinese students.

The results of the study indicate that among cohesive devices, reference and lexical cohesion are used with the highest frequency by Chinese senior students while lexical cohesion gets the highest frequency of errors made by them. The statistics show that the application of cohesion strongly relates to the quality of TOEFL independent writing.

Finally, this thesis put forward some suggestions for improving the usage of cohesive devices.

关键词：cohesion；coherence；TOEFL independent writing；senior high students

一、文献综述

1. Introduction

Cohesion, in discourse analysis, has been the focus in academia ever since it came into existence. Cohesion in English, written by Halliday and Hasan is widely accepted as the mark of the foundation of Cohesion Theory. They thought that “the concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text and that define it as a text” (1976:4).

So far, many scholars home and abroad have studied the relationship between cohesion and writing including TOEFL independent writing. Sui and Chen (2010) believe that it is essential that L2 writers be taught cohesive devices and a clear way of thinking, which could “create a proper semantic space which makes the writing smooth and keeps the relevance to the subject” (2010:10). Studies of Xu Yuchen(2000), Ye Lin (2002), and Chen Mei (2005) and many other researchers show a close relationship between cohesion and the quality of English compositions: Most “Good compositions” have more frequently-used cohesive devices. Therefore, cohesion plays a significant role in writing.

However, Chinese candidates generally have common weaknesses in achieving satisfactory grades. The misuses of cohesion in their compositions include inappropriate referencing, ambiguity meaning, illogic paragraphing, lack of clear progression and inadequate, inaccurate or overuse of cohesive devices (Jing, 2007). Therefore, studies of English writing from the perspective of cohesion should be done to increase discourse awareness and try to figure out effective way of improving writing ability.

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