Undergraduate Thesis

This is my undergraduate thesis titled “The Corpus Study of the Relationship Between Cohesive Devises and the Quality of Writing” advised by Dr. Ying Pan at Northeast Normal University. link

Abstract

In the view of native speakers, the cohesive devise in essays, dissertations, literatures, and other English genre will be paid more attention and even taken as a significant evaluation standard for the quality of writing. Some foreign teachers in colleges and universities prefer to scrutinize their students’ essay organization and structures rather than the beautiful expressions and sentences. This phenomenon means that the use of cohesive devises is more relevant to the quality of writing in English teachers’ perspectives. Until now, many research still come up to an inconsistent result, which need to be refined in the later studies. This thesis will attempt to summarize the commonly used cohesive devices from English majors, conclude some effective cohesive devices used to improve the quality of writing, as well as illustrate the comprehensive gap between cohesive problems students acknowledge themselves and practical cohesive problems. On the basis of Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory (1976) and taxonomy of cohesive devices, including conjunction, lexical cohesion, substitution, reference, ellipsis and substitution, the author analyzed samples and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL 2.0). Besides, the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and writing quality are examined. Through exploring the current situation of using cohesive devices in Chinese English majors’ argumentative essays, the author intends to provide a general view and potential suggestions for the later English majors to improve the quality of their writing in the aspect of cohesion. The research result reveals that there is a slight positive relationship between the frequency of cohesive devises and the quality of writing. However, without the influence of certain cohesive devises, some cohesive devises indeed have a positive correlation with the quality of writing, like conjunction, substitution, collocations. Besides, not using cohesive devises too much have a positive effect on the writing quality, sometimes, it will also have negative effects, and for instance, it will make the passage read dull and redundant, make the references unclear to present, and even make the thesis statement ambiguous. Therefore, the author attempts to provide suggestions for the later research in the virtue of this research.