Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 Context of the study
The research described in this dissertation was conducted in China, where English isstudied as a foreign language (EFL). In universities in China, English is an independentmajor. For the majority of English major undergraduates, writing compositions is one ofthe most challenging tasks as it requires a wide range of knowledge and skills, such asvocabulary knowledge, grammatical knowledge and logical thinking skills (Ferris andHedgcock, 2017). To improve the quality of English major students’ writing, this researchfocuses on the study of students’ compositions.For English major students in China, writing classes start from the second year ofundergraduate Education. According to the English Language Teaching Curriculum forEnglish majors (Ministry of Education, 2017), writing requirements for students ofdifferent grades vary. English major sophomores are required to produce a 120 to 150word-essay within 30 minutes, which should be cohesive, coherent, clearly structured andfree of grammatical mistakes. Third-year students are asked to be able to finish a 250 to300-word book report, story or formal letter in half an hour, which should be creative andprofound. Fourth-year undergraduates are expected to be able to produce a 300 to400-word essay within 30 minutes. In addition to the requirements in terms of content andorganisation, the essay should employ appropriate expressions and achieve fluency.
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1.2 Rationale for the research
As can be seen from the above requirements, cohesion has been officially proposedas a standard to be used when judging the writing quality of second-year English majorstudents’ work. To improve students’ accuracy in the use of cohesive devices, it isessential to detect the gaps in cohesion teaching by comparing the differences in cohesionerrors in students’ writings and in their perceptions of these. To achieve this purpose, thisstudy first focuses on the analysis of cohesion errors that occurred in undergraduates’essays. This is followed by an investigation of students’ perceptions’ of their cohesionerrors and, lastly, the gaps between reality and students’ perceptions of cohesion errors.The rationale for the study is described in the following paragraphs.
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Chapter Two: Literature Review
2.1 Cohesion
Halliday and Hasan (1976: 4) define cohesion as the “relations of meaning that existwithin the text, and that define it as a text”, and argue that it “occurs where theinterpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another”. Paltridge(2017: 131) notes that cohesion indicates to “the relationship between items in a text suchas words, phrases and clauses and other items such as pronouns, nouns and conjunctions”.Olshtain and Celce-Murcia (2017: 718) view cohesion as “those overt features of a textwhich provide surface evidence for its unity and connectedness”. The above definitionssuggest that cohesion is the surface feature of a text that can be explored by examining theuse of cohesive devices.In terms of the types of cohesion, Halliday and Hasan (1976: 5) note that “cohesion isexpressed partly through the grammar and partly through the vocabulary”, and canaccordingly be divided into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. There are fivetypes of cohesive device: Reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical，英语论文题目，英语论文范文
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