Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Undoubtedly, English, as a language used most widely around the world, has been wielded in the international trade, transportation system, radio broadcasting, traveling, mail service, the cooperation of international science and technology and other fields. With the pace of reform and opening-up speeding up and international exchange growing increasingly, English, as a kind of communicative tool, plays an extremely crucial role in different sectors of the society. English writing is considered as a vital communicative means in language communication and is of vital importance in English learning. However, as one of four basic skills acquired in English learning, English writing competence is deemed as the most difficult aspect to master and thus, it has been a hot issue many linguists and educators begin to attach importance to. Walter (1983) claims that writing is the last and perhaps the most difficult skill students learn. Albeit English major students have learned English for six or more years, they still consider writing as the most difficult part in English learning. In accordance with the study done by Cai Huiping (2017), students’ average writing scores in Test for English Majors Grade 4 (TEM-4) in 2017 and 2017 are 65.40 and 61.88 respectively and those in TEM-8 are 60.05 and 58.05, which suggest that writing is the weak aspect in English learning, even for English majors and the problems and reasons remain to be discussed and elaborated. Huang Xiaoyu (2017) makes an analysis of Chinese English learners’ errors in English writing and claims that the most common problems in writing are grammar, the use of vocabulary and textual cohesion. Consequently, incoherence is a crucial problem in students’ compositions. Halliday and Hasan (2017) claim that readers could not understand or translate the discourse accurately without cohesion and lexical cohesion accounts for about fifty percent in various discourse patterns. Many scholars abroad (Witte and Faigley, 1981; Mc Culley, 1985; Spiegel and Fitzgerald, 1990) find that there is a certain correlation between lexical cohesion and the quality of discourse. Moreover, many Chinese scholars (Xu Yucheng, 2017; Fang Cheng, 2017; Jiang Jing, 2017) are firmly in favor of the inevitable connections between cohesive devices and writing quality. T，英语论文网站，英语毕业论文 |
