COHESIVE FEATURES IN THE EXPOSITORY WRITING OF UNDERGRADUATES IN TWO CHINESE UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

This study investigated the use of cohesive features in the expository compositions of Chinese undergraduates majoring in English, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. One hundred and seven essays were collected from two Chinese normal universities and assessed by three raters using a marking scheme entitled ESL Composition Profile. Essays of Grade A were identified as good essays, Grade B essays as average and Grade C essays were considered poor. Halliday and Hasan's (1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices and their framework for analysis were used in the study. For statistical analysis, descriptive statistics were used, and later inferential statistics (e.g. Pearson's correlation) were computed to examine the relationship between the frequency of use of cohesive ties in each category (reference, conjunction and lexical ties) and the quality of the compositions as determined by the marking scheme. At another level, analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the difference between the highly-rated essays and the poorly-rated ones in terms of the use of different types of cohesive features and the distances of ties. In the qualitative approach, the data were also analyzed to discover more about the patterns of use of cohesive devices by the sampled students and the problems that they generally encounter. The qualitative study therefore focused on (1) the range and choice of ties in each cohesive category, and (2) the typical problems they have in a particular area of use of cohesive devices. The results show that: • Students in this study employed in their writing a variety of cohesive devices with some categories of ties used more frequently than others. Lexical devices were the most frequently used among the three categories examined, followed by conjunctions and reference devices, in that order. • In terms of tie distances, the majority of the cohesive ties in this study were either immediate or remote. Mediated ties and cataphoric ties were rarely used. It was also found that immediate and remote ties were more associated with lexical ties and conjunction ties whereas mediated ties were significantly correlated with reference ties. • There was no statistically significant relationship between the number of cohesive ties used and the quality of writing of the same expository compositions. In other words, there was no statistically significant difference in the frequency of use of cohesive ties between the highly-rated essays and poorly-rated essays. • At the qualitative level, it was found that there were certain problems faced by all Chinese students in the choice and use of cohesive devices in English, which included ambiguity in reference; pronoun disagreement; omission, overuse and misuse of the definite article "the"; overuse and misuse of conjunctions in general; initial positioning of conjunctions; misuse of lexical items and collocations, and inadequate use of comparatives and lexical cohesion. This study concluded with some pedagogical implications and suggestions on how teachers could use the findings to plan and design focused lessons so as to help learners become more effective and accurate in using cohesive devices. Suggestions were also made on the teaching and learning of lexical cohesion - an area of weakness for Chinese students of English, and on the integration of the teaching of writing and reading at the university level in mainland China.