Cohesive features in argumentative writing produced by Chinese undergraduates

Because cohesion is important both to the reader and the writer to create and comprehend a text, teachers have placed much emphasis on text cohesion and coherence in their teaching and evaluation of writing. Using Halliday and Hasan's [Halliday, M.A.K., Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. Longman, London] taxonomy of cohesive devices and their framework for analysis, this study investigated the use of cohesive devices in 50 argumentative compositions created by Chinese undergraduate non-English majors. It was found that the students were able to use a variety of cohesive devices in their writing, among which lexical devices formed the largest percentage of the total number of cohesive devices, followed by references and conjunctives. The quality of writing was also revealed to significantly co-vary with the number of lexical devices and the total number of cohesive devices used. Apart from that, certain problems were identified in the writing in terms of the use of reference and lexical devices.