RESEARCH PAPERS

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An Investigation of Cohesive Errors in the Writing of PRC Tertiary EFL Students

An Investigation of Cohesive Errors in the Writing of

PRC Tertiary EFL Students
by Feng Ting (feng_ting@stta.org.sg)

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Most studies of cohesion in student writing have been devoted to examining the inter-relationship between the
quantity of cohesive devices and the writing quality. The pedagogical value of such a research interest has been
called into question; and indeed the quantification of all the cohesive ties present in relation to writing quality,
without considering whether the cohesive tie is properly used in the text, makes such studies questionable. The
present study suggests that erroneous or inadequate cohesive ties, as opposed to properly used ones, deserve
greater attention. To enrich information on cohesive errors (see Johns, 1984), the study analyzed cohesive ties that
had been unsuccessfully used in the writing of Chinese tertiary EFL students studying at the Centre for English
Language Communication, National University of Singapore, using Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework and
taxonomy of cohesive ties. In addition to qualitative analysis of cohesive errors, the study also employed one-way
ANOVA to examine the difference in the number of cohesive errors between good essays and poor essays that were
assessed with the ESL Composition Profile (Jacobs et al., 1981).
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■ Background Cohesion in English (1976), language educators and

Writing in English has always been a demanding task
facing ESL/EFL learners. This is because English writing,
compared with English speaking, is a more formal mode
of English production and therefore requires ESL/EFL
learners to be aware of the properties of English text. To
help ESL/EFL students compose better English essays,
teachers are expected to be sensitive to the problems
which emerge in their students’ essays, and take relevant
pedagogical measures.
As far as the English writing performance of tertiary
EFL students in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is
concerned, one of the salient problems at the discourse
level, according to Zhang (2000), is the wrong or
inadequate use of cohesive devices. This can be attributed,
to some extent, to the fact that English language teaching
(ELT) in China traditionally emphasizes correct construc-
tion of sentences, or sentence grammaticality, in both
secondary and tertiary English education.
■ Literature Review
Writing problems involving cohesion deserve much
attention. This is because cohesion as an indispensable
text-forming element plays a critical role in composing a
text. According to Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English
(1976), it is realized through cohesive ties which link
the presupposing and the presupposed across sentence
boundaries. In other words, cohesive ties create intimate
inter-sentential relationships, which to a large extent
distinguish a text from a sequence of isolated sentences.
Thanks to the publication of Halliday and Hasan’s
teachers have become sensitive to the use of cohesive
devices in language students’ written compositions.
Generally the examination of cohesive devices in ELT
has been carried out using Halliday and Hasan’s (1976)
taxonomy of categories and subcategories of cohesive ties.
These are summarized as follows:
1. Reference: Pronominals; Demonstratives; Compara-
tives
2. Substitution: Nominal Substitution; Verbal Substi-
tution; Clausal Substitution
3. Ellipsis: Nominal Ellipsis; Verbal Ellipsis; Clausal
Ellipsis
4. Conjunction: Additive; Adversative; Causal; Tem-
poral; Continuative
5. Lexical Cohesion: Reiteration; Collocation
Despite Halliday and Hasan’s indication that
cohesion is in effect a linguistic property in relation to
textual features, language researchers have tended to
interpret the message of Halliday and Hasan (1976) as
follows: given that cohesive devices are important
elements for constructing a coherent text, their
appearance should cause coherence and therefore
contribute to the quality of the text. As a result, a number
of language researchers, particularly ESL teachers, adopted
Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy and framework
of cohesion to conduct empirical studies examining
whether the use of cohesive devices in students’ writing
correlates with coherence or the overall writing quality
(e.g. Witte and Faigley, 1981; Tierney and Mosenthal,
1983; Connor, 1984). Generally, most of those

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2 | Feng Ting
researchers have found that there is no significant
relationship between the quantity of cohesive devices
used and the quality of writing.
Having a skeptical attitude towards the findings of
previous studies, Zhang (2000) employed richer research
methods (e.g. correlation, ANOVA, etc.) to reexamine the
same research question by investigating cohesive devices
in the writing of Chinese undergraduate EFL students in
two PRC universities. His study to some extent enriched
knowledge of cohesion in the writing of EFL students
who have been relatively neglected somehow in previous
studies, and the sample size in his study (n=107) was
noticeably larger than most of those used before.
However, his major finding based on sophisticated
research methodology—that no statistically significant
relationship exists between the frequency of cohesive ties
used and the quality of writing—seems to be hardly new.
It is worth noting that Zhang (2000), like the authors
of a number of previous studies, did not explicitly set
out the criteria by which cohesive ties in the sample essays
were counted and categorized. He appeared to count
every cohesive tie present in the writing and then
categorize them according to their functions described
by Halliday and Hasan (1976). It has to be pointed out
that in any study which intends to examine the
relationship between the number of cohesive ties and
the quality of writing, counting all the cohesive ties
present, without taking into account whether or not the
cohesive ties are properly used in the context, to some
extent makes the study questionable. This is because
when a cohesive tie is used inappropriately, the contextual
meaning is very likely to be ambiguous or misleading
for the reader, and this is actually counter-productive in
making the writing cohesive. Normally, problematic
cohesive ties caused by, say, misuse therefore produce a
negative effect on the writing quality rather than
positively contributing to it. In this sense, any attempt to
investigate the relationship between the number of
cohesive ties and the quality of writing without
distinguishing between problematic cohesive ties and
properly used cohesive ties, not surprisingly, calls into
question how far the study is valid.
Despite its significant role in the analysis of cohesive
devices, the topic of cohesive errors in composition seems
not to have received as much attention as it deserves.
There are only a small number of studies exclusively
aimed at cohesive errors (e.g. Johns, 1984 and Crewe,
1990). Although those studies report some typical
cohesive errors in students’ writing, they are commonly
limited to description of a certain type of cohesive error,
e.g. Conjunction. Nor do they employ a quantitative
method to investigate the relationship between the
frequency of cohesive errors and the writing quality.
Ironically, Zhang (2000), who did not exclude cohesive
errors when investigating cohesive ties in relation to the
writing quality, did include a qualitative analysis in his
study to examine the ways in which three types of
cohesive ties (i.e. Reference, Conjunction and Lexical
Cohesion) had been improperly used (e.g. over-use,
misuse). Nevertheless his study did not answer the
Copyright © 2003 Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society (STETS)
question of whether the occurrence of some types of
cohesive errors is statistically specific to low-quality
essays.
■ Aims of the Study
Given the fact that cohesive errors have been either
neglected or examined incompletely in previous
cohesion-related studies, the present study is intended
to conduct a comprehensive investigation of their
occurrence in student writing. Specifically, the study
embraces a twofold aim:
1. to conduct a qualitative study to find and describe
the types of cohesive errors made in the compositions
of Chinese tertiary EFL students;
2. to conduct a quantitative study to ascertain whether
some types of cohesive errors significantly distinguish
poor essays from good essays, and some other types
do not.
■ Significance of the Study
The present study can be considered to be a critical
response to earlier findings that no significant
relationship exists between the quality of student writing
and the number of cohesive devices used. Generally the
study was expected to yield some findings on the features
of cohesive errors made in compositions of Chinese
tertiary EFL students, which could, to some extent, be
complementary to the findings in Zhang (2000), and also
help establish a perception of what types of cohesive
errors significantly distinguish poor essays from good
essays—and what types do not. The study, although
confined to PRC tertiary EFL students studying in
Singapore, may well be replicated to investigate cohesive
errors in the writing of EFL students from other areas,
e.g. Southeast Asia. Hopefully the present study will
contribute to the understanding of the extent to which
different types of cohesive errors undermine the quality
of writing; and also provide pedagogical implications for
EFL teachers and material developers in their efforts to
help EFL students produce better English essays beyond
the sentence level.
■ Methodology
Subjects
The subjects in the present study were Chinese tertiary
EFL students who were studying at the Centre for English
Language Communication (CELC), National University
of Singapore (NUS). Every year a certain number of PRC
tertiary students enroll at the National University of
Singapore (NUS) for their undergraduate education.
Since NUS is an educational institution using English as
the medium, these Chinese students are required to take
a six-month pre-sessional English course at the Centre
for English Language Communication before they
embark on their undergraduate study.
The selection of subjects was based on the fact that
EFL students at the tertiary level have received relatively
 An Investigation of Cohesive Errors in the Writing of PRC Tertiary EFL Students
scant attention in previous cohesion-related studies.
Zhang (1998) indicated that “studies on the written work
of EFL students in relation to cohesion are relatively few.
China is a case in point.” For this reason, he conducted a
study to investigate cohesive features in the writing of
Chinese tertiary EFL students. The subjects in his study
(which were the same as those used in his later study—
Zhang, 2000) were second-year English majors in two
Chinese universities. To complement Zhang’s (1998,
2000) studies in terms of the selection of subjects, the
present study chose to focus on Chinese tertiary EFL
students who were majoring in subjects other than
English.
Sample Essays
150 essays written for an English essay contest held in
April 2001 (approximately the middle of the six-month
English program) were obtained from the CELC. 80 out
of 150 essays were randomly selected for the study. In
the contest, the students had been asked to write an essay
within one and a half hours without referring to
dictionaries. The following topic was given to the
students:
With the pace of the advancement of technology,
it has been predicted that technology will totally
change the processes of teaching and learning. The
changes will be comprehensive and thorough in terms
of content, teaching/learning methods, and
relationship between teachers and students.
Please respond to the previous paragraph by
stating if you agree or disagree with the idea. Write
your essay by using all the writing techniques you
have learned in the program. You need to support
and/or explain your idea to lead to a logical conclusion
by using facts, examples, reasons, description, compa-
rison, cause and effect, or other appropriate
techniques.
Theoretical Framework and Taxonomy
As in most of the preceding research studies on cohesive
devices in writing, Halliday and Hasan’s (1976)
framework and taxonomy of cohesive devices were used
in the present study to analyze cohesive errors for two
reasons. First, Halliday and Hasan’s framework is
comprehensive, and is also well-developed and widely-
used (Zhang, 1998); second, since the study was intended
to complement and enrich some previous studies (e.g.
Johns, 1984; Zhang, 2000) which adopted Halliday and
Hasan’s (1976) framework and taxonomy of cohesion,
keeping to the same model would facilitate the
comparative analysis of results.
In Halliday and Hasan (1976), the category of Lexical
Cohesion was roughly divided into two subcategories—
Reiteration and Lexical Collocation, with Reiteration
further divided into Repetition, Synonym/near-Synonym,
Superordinate, General Word. In Halliday (1994),
however, Lexical Cohesion neatly consists of three
subcategories—Repetition, Synonymy, Collocation.
Synonymy is described as encompassing such special
cases as Superordinate, General Word, Hyponymy
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(specific-general, e.g. cat is a hyponym of animal),
Meronymy (part-whole, e.g. root is a meronym of tree)
and Antonymy. The changes to the original typology of
Lexical Cohesion can be shown in Table 1 and Table 2.
Table 1 Configuration of Lexical Cohesion
(Halliday and Hasan: 1976)
Category Subcategory Sub-subcategory
Lexical Cohesion Reiteration Repetition; Synonym/
Near-synonym; Super-
ordinate; General Word
Collocation
Table 2 Configuration of Lexical Cohesion
(Halliday: 1994)
Category Subcategory Sub-subcategory
Lexical Cohesion Repetition
Synonymy Superordinate; General
Word; Hyponymy;
Meronymy; Antonymy
Collocation
As can be seen, Halliday (1994) divided the original
subcategory—Reiteration—into two subcategories,
Repetition and Synonymy; and subsumed previously
proposed sub-subcategories—Synonym/Near-synonym,
Superordinate, General Word—into one subcategory,
Synonymy. The changes enriched the content of the
subcategories and made the configuration of lexical
cohesion more clear-cut. Therefore the present study
decided to look at Lexical Cohesion-related data using
the 1994 typology proposed by Halliday.
Qualitative Analysis of Cohesive Errors
In the qualitative analysis, the study identified and coded
errors in the use of cohesive ties described by Halliday
and Hasan (1976), and then extracted typical cohesive
errors for detailed analysis.
Quantitative Analysis of Cohesive Errors
The quantitative analysis employed one-way ANOVA to
investigate significant difference between the good essays
and the poor essays in terms of the number of cohesive
errors.
Marking Scheme
To conduct the quantitative study, all the 80 essays
randomly selected for analysis were rated. The present
study, like Zhang (2000), employed the ESL Composition
Profile (Jacobs et al., 1981) as the marking scheme to
assess the students’ essays. The profile consists of five
weighted components: content, organization, vocabulary,
language use and mechanics. It is believed to be “one of
the most widely used analytical scales for ESL writing”
(Reid, 1993:235), and “perhaps the only analytic rating
scheme for assessing adult second language writing which
has been widely tested, documented, and used in
published studies” (Wong, 1992: 107).
STETS Language & Communication Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003
4 | Feng Ting

Inter-Rater Reliability similar to what was reported in Zhang (1998): “The

Using the marking scheme, two independent raters
assessed all the 80 essays. One rater was the researcher
and the other one was an MA colleague, both of whom
had a few years of experience of teaching English to
Chinese tertiary EFL students. The essays were first given
numerical scores which were then converted to letter
grades—A, B, C —representing good essays, average essays
and poor essays respectively. The conversion can be seen
in Table 3.
Of the three groups of essays, average essays (Group
B) were excluded from the quantitative study as the aim
of the quantitative analysis was to show difference
between the good essays and the poor essays in the
number of cohesive errors. The reliability of the two raters
in the assessment, calculated on the Spearman-Brown
Prophecy Formula (Henning, 1987: 83), was 0.85, which
was highly acceptable.
■ Results and Discussion
Errors in Reference
Errors in Reference identified in this study are
characteristically similar to the errors reported in Johns
(1984) and Zhang (1998, 2000). Statistically, errors in
use of Pronominals are specific to the poor essays, while
errors involving Demonstratives and Comparatives tend
to be common to both poor and good essays. This means
that the poor essays reveal significantly more errors
involving personal pronouns, compared to the good
essays. Given the result of the qualitative analysis—that
errors in use of personal pronouns are characteristic of
reference ambiguity and reference disagreement—poor
writers tend to have considerable difficulty in
maintaining reference clarity and consistency in relation
to participants in the context.
In contrast, errors in use of Demonstratives and
Comparatives influence not only the poor essays but also
the good essays. The qualitative study shows that the
majority of demonstrative errors relate to inappropriate
use of the definite reference item “the”. This finding is
students sometimes omitted obligatory articles…but
more often they inserted unnecessary ones…” (p.74) The
occurrence of this sort of error largely lies in the fact that
there are no articles in the Chinese language (Chang,
1987:331), which explains why both good writers and
poor writers find it hard to use the definite article
correctly.
Unlike Karasi (1994) and Zhang (2000) who
reported that comparatives were least used in the
students’ essays, most of the student writers in the present
study used comparatives to compare the present with the
past in arguing whether or not comprehensive changes
will take place in terms of teaching/learning in the future.
As a result, comparative items, e.g. “higher”, “better”,
“larger”, “faster”, etc., are commonly found in the writing
across grades. The choice of comparative items, however,
is largely restricted to adjectives of the comparative degree.
Comparative indicators of other types, e.g. “other”,
“similar”, “else”, etc., are less used. Often, when such
comparative items are actually used, problems arise, most
of which are typically related to inappropriate use. This
is found to be the case even in the group of good essays,
which may, in a sense, account for why the good essays
are not significantly superior to the poor essays in the
use of comparative reference.
● There is a statistically significant difference between
the good essays and the poor essays in the number
of cohesive errors in Pronominal Reference but no
significant difference in errors involving Demon-
strative and Comparative Reference (see Table 4).
Errors in Substitution
Cohesive ties of Substitution are seldom used in the
sample essays examined, which is the same finding as in
Zhang (2000). This phenomenon is mostly due to what
Halliday (1994) points out: namely that “Substitution
and Ellipsis are more characteristically found in
dialogues”. (p.337) That both good writers and poor
writers sparingly use cohesive ties of substitution to a
large extent contributes to the non-significant difference

Table 3 The Conversion of Numerical Scores into Letter Grades

Mean Score Standard Deviation Minimum Score Maximum Score Range

Grade A (n=20) 79.90 3.62 76 90 14
Grade B (n=40) 69.93 2.60 65 75 10
Grade C (n=20) 60.55 2.78 55 64 9
Significance level set at 0.05

Table 4 Results of ANOVA on Cohesive Errors of Reference

Essays Grade A (n=20) Grade C (n=20) Mean Difference Significance Level

Cohesive Errors Mean S.D. Mean S.D A vs. C F-value P=

Pronominals 0.95 0.92 2.25 1.48 –1.30 11.1301 0.0019

Demonstratives 1.95 1.24 2.60 1.91 –0.65 1.6295 0.2095
Comparatives 0.40 0.66 0.60 0.73 –0.20 0.8260 0.3692
Significance level set at 0.05

Copyright © 2003 Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society (STETS)

 An Investigation of Cohesive Errors in the Writing of PRC Tertiary EFL Students | 5

Table 5 Results of ANOVA on Cohesive Errors of Substitution

Essays Grade A (n=20) Grade C (n=20) Mean Difference Significance Level

Cohesive Errors Mean S.D. Mean S.D A vs. C F-value P=

Substitution 0.10 0.30 0.20 0.40 –0.10 0.80 0.3767

Significance level set at 0.05

Table 6 Results of ANOVA on Cohesive Errors of Conjunction

Essays Grade A (n=20) Grade C (n=20) Mean Difference Significance Level

Cohesive Errors Mean S.D. Mean S.D A vs. C F-value P=

Additive 0.75 0.83 1.20 0.93 –0.45 2.6065 0.1147

Adversative 0.95 1.12 1.05 1.12 –0.10 0.0797 0.7792
Causal 0.35 0.57 0.65 0.85 –0.30 1.7185 0.1977
Temporal 0.15 0.36 0.40 0.58 –0.25 2.6824 0.1097
Significance level set at 0.05

between the two groups in terms of the number of
cohesive errors in Substitution. Nevertheless, some
features of cohesive errors involving Substitution have
been identified in the study. Those students who make
errors in Substitution tend to omit necessary nominal
substitution items or use reference items, e.g. “it”, “them”
to take the place of substitution items “that”, “those”.
The identification of such problems suggests that cohesive
errors in the use of Substitution, albeit few in number,
are revealing and therefore should not be omitted in
cohesive error-related studies simply because of their low
frequency of occurrence.
● There is no statistically significant difference between
the good essays and the poor essays in the number
of cohesive errors in Substitution (see Table 5).
Errors in Conjunction
Cohesive errors concerned with Conjunction are
extensively found in the sample essays across all the
grades. Specifically, errors in use of Adversatives and
Additives are more common than errors in using Causals
and Temporals. The fact that there is no significant
difference between the good essays and the poor essays
in the use of the four subcategories of Conjunction
implies that the use of conjunctive ties is generally a weak
area for all writers of English with a Chinese first language
background.
● There is no statistically significant difference between
the good essays and the poor essays in the number
of cohesive errors in the four subcategories of
Conjunction—Additives, Adversatives, Causals and
Temporals (see Table 6).
The most typical additive errors are concerned with
superfluity of additives, which has been discussed in
some previous studies, e.g. Crewe (1990), Field (1993),
and Zhang (1998, 2000). The student writers tend to use
unnecessary additive conjunctions between statements
simply to indicate to the reader that they are adding
another point. For example, “In addition”, “Moreover”,
“Furthermore” are often used adjacently in the writing.
The over-use of additive conjunctions causes redundancy
and even “can have a disastrous effect on the clarity of a
writer’s message and produce an adverse affect on the
reader”. (Field, 1993:247) Crewe (1990) largely attribute
over-use of conjunctions to the misconception students
hold about the use of logical connectives, which is, “the
more, the better”. Such a misconception, he argued,
resulted from some kinds of mechanical exercise devised
to train students in the correct use of connectives and
also from the education examination system which not
only encourage students to make abundant use of
connectives in their writing but award marks in
examinations for the sheer presence of the connectives.
No doubt Crewe (1990) provides a sound explanation
for the over-use of conjunction in students’ writing.
However, he seems merely to emphasize some
environmental/external contributing factors, and to
neglect student writers’ internal language developmental
stages which may also in some way cause this problem.
It was found in the present study that those students
who pile on unnecessary additive conjunctions in writing
tend to use such conjunctions frequently to link short
and simple sentences. Actually quite a number of
redundant additive conjunctions can be effectively
eliminated by using clause connectors (e.g. “which”,
“whereby”) to change one-clause sentences to longer,
hierarchical sentences. In this sense, it would be
reasonable to say that the phenomenon of over-use of
additive conjunction in the study is more or less related
to the students’ inability to employ complex hierarchical
sentence structures.
Errors in adversative conjunctions are commonly
found in poor essays and good essays alike. The
characteristics of the inappropriate use in the two groups,
however, are somewhat different. Generally the good
writers’ errors in the use of adversative conjunctions are
largely attributable to L1 (Chinese) interference. For
example, a high percentage of errors in the use of
adversative conjunctions found in the good essays reflect
the use of such adversative conjunctions as “on the other
hand”, “at the same time” without any explicit or implied
contrast. In other words, such adversative conjunctions

STETS Language & Communication Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003

6 | Feng Ting
are simply given an additive function for introducing a
new point which is parallel to the previous point in
meaning. Very likely this kind of conjunctive error is
caused by L1 (Chinese) interference, because the Chinese
equivalents of “on the other hand” and “at the same
time”—“Ling Yi Fang Mian” and “Tong Shi” are used
purely as additive.
In contrast, the poor writers’ errors in the use of
adversative conjunctions are presumably subject to two-
fold influencing factors. In addition to inter-lingual
interference, the poor writers seem to be affected by intra-
lingual interference, since they confuse similar adversative
conjunctions from time to time, e.g. using “on the
contrary” for “however”. Although similar problems of
inappropriate use of adversative conjunctions are pointed
out in Crewe (1990), Johns (1984) and Zhang (1998,
2000), these previous studies did not differentiate
between inter-lingual and intra-lingual interference.
Errors in using causal conjunctions have seldom been
addressed in previous studies. Problematic causal
conjunctions identified in the present study are
characteristic of inappropriate or redundant use of causal
conjunctions. There are two major types of inappropriate
use. First, some of the student writers, including a couple
of good writers, seem unable to distinguish between fact
and opinion, and tend to take personal opinions or
assumptions as causes. For example, it is commonly
found in the study that students suppose or imagine that
something amazing will happen in the future, based on
which they conclude that “therefore, comprehensive and
thorough changes will take place in terms of teaching
and learning in the future.” In this case, the causal
conjunction “therefore” is used to present a supposed
result which does not rest on solid facts but on premises
consisting of subjective assumptions.
Second, some of the students have confused the
proper order of the cause and the effect. For example, a
student wrote: “Students won’t need to go to school, they
will read books and do exercise on the screen, therefore
new technology will come to us and benefit us.” The
causal relationship displayed in this sentence is
problematic, because the student overlooks the fact that
that “new technology will come to us and benefit us”
should properly be the justification of why students won’t
need to go to school and can read books and do exercise
on the screen. The misuse of “therefore” in this case
reveals flaws in logic in the student’s thought process. In
addition, it was found that some poor writers overuse
causal conjunctions. For example, they use “because” and
“since” adjacently with each statement explaining the
preceding one, which makes the account rather
Table 7 Results of ANOVA on Cohesive Errors of Lexical Cohesion
Essays Grade A (n=20)
Cohesive Errors Mean S.D.
Repetition 0.00 0.00
Synonymy 0.00 0.00
Significance level set at 0.05
Copyright © 2003 Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society (STETS)
redundant. This phenomenon seems to imply that the
poor writers tend to be heavily affected by the habit of
spoken language, and therefore need to make a great
effort to learn how to write formal/academic essays.
Of the four types of conjunctive errors, the number
of errors in using temporal conjunctions is the smallest.
Most of the errors in temporal conjunctions found in
the study are related to their inappropriate use. For
example, the use of a certain temporal conjunction may
contradict the tense used (e.g. “…Students can establish
a more friendly relationship with their teachers. Since
then, the lesson will be given in a more friendly way,
and students will feel comfortable in communicating
with teachers.”) Another example is that the temporal
conjunction “nowadays” is frequently used as a noun by
some of the students, e.g. “in nowadays”, “regarding
nowadays” and the like. Presumably those students who
make such errors simply memorized “nowadays” as a
synonym of “today” without caring about differences in
usage between the two. By and large, errors in the use of
temporal conjunctions do not pose a serious problem
for the students. The inappropriate use of temporal
conjunction is mostly due to the habit of learning words
by rote.
Errors in Lexical Cohesion
In sharp contrast to conjunctive errors, a significant
difference has been found between the good essays and
the poor essays in terms of the number of errors in the
two subcategories of Lexical Cohesion—Repetition and
Synonymy. This means that the ability to use lexical items
in writing constitutes a significant discriminating factor
between the good writers and the poor writers.
● There is a statistically significant difference between
the good essays and the poor essays in the number
of cohesive errors in Lexical Cohesion, viz. Repetition
and Synonymy (see Table 7).
All the errors in Repetition involve redundant use of
repetition, that is, the same lexical item is frequently
repeated in the context. Redundant repetition, although
not seriously obscuring the meaning of the message,
renders the expression monotonous and uninteresting,
and retards the flow of ideas. The root cause of redundant
repetition seems likely to be the limited vocabulary,
which prevents the students from employing diversified
words (e.g. synonyms) and expressions in an account.
Another factor contributing to this problem may be that
the students have been used to using redundant words
in speech and bring this habit into formal writing. In
other words, the students seem not to have been aware
that one of the important features of formal/academic
Grade C (n=20) Mean Difference Significance Level
Mean S.D A vs. C F-value P=
0.30 0.64 –0.30 4.3945 0.0428
0.25 0.43 –0.25 6.7604 0.0132
 An Investigation of Cohesive Errors in the Writing of PRC Tertiary EFL Students
writing is to avoid redundant words and expressions. The
fact that the good essays reveal no errors of redundant
repetition suggests that the good writers not only possess
a significantly larger vocabulary vis-à-vis the poor writers,
but are relatively familiar with the convention of language
use for formal/academic writing.
Errors in Synonymy identified in the study involve
inappropriate use of synonyms and antonyms. For
example, a student wrote “In many countries, teachers
always play an active role in the classroom. They control
the content and the method of teaching. Students are
rather negative”. Here, the writer inappropriately used
“negative” to correspond to “active”, to describe students
who are “passive”. This kind of problem is probably due
to student writers’ weak ability to differentiate synonyms
in meaning and usage.
■ Pedagogical Implications
Implications of Cohesive Errors in Poor Essays
Identifying the types of cohesive errors that are specific
to poor essays will help English language teachers take
relevant pedagogical measures to deal with such errors
in students’ essays. Since this study shows that errors in
lexical cohesion and pronominal reference are specific
to the poor essays, teachers may need to focus more
attention on these when working with poorer writers.
Errors in pronominal reference are due to weak
awareness of reference clarity and consistency. Those
involving lexical cohesion can be attributed, in general,
to such factors as limited vocabulary, misuse of words
and interference from the first language (i.e. Chinese).
Limited lexical repertoire, according to Connor (1984),
represents a developmental problem which can be solved
over time with the development of overall language
proficiency. The other factors contributing to lexical errors
(e.g. misuse of words), however, are largely the result of
Chinese students’ habit of learning English words
through isolated bilingual lists or English-Chinese
dictionaries, rather than English-English dictionaries
(Zhang, 2000). In some vocabulary books commonly
used by Chinese students, English synonyms are grouped
with identical or very similar Chinese equivalents, but
without examples showing the use of each word. As a
result, students tend to select the wrong English word.
To reduce lexical and personal reference errors, it
would be necessary to encourage student writers,
particularly poor writers, to learn new words in their
contexts of use rather than from isolated lists. It is equally
important for the teacher to provide remedial instruction
and intensive exercises tailored to the poor writers. The
instruction and exercises may take various forms, but the
purpose should be identical: to guide poor writers to
remove redundant words, to use synonyms and antonyms
properly, and to correct misused personal pronouns.
Implications of Cohesive Errors in Both Poor and Good
Essays
Dealing with the types of cohesive errors frequently made
by both poor and good writers will entail some changes
| 7
in the English writing curriculum and teaching materials.
Since the study shows that errors in conjunction and in
demonstrative and comparative reference tend to be
common to both poor and good essays, it may be
necessary to introduce lessons focusing systematically on
these areas into the teaching of writing, explaining clearly
with adequate examples the meaning and correct use of
reference items and conjunction devices in English. Such
explanation can be productive in helping students
thoroughly understand the semantic force or the logical
meaning behind conjunctions, and the rules and
conventions for the use of reference items (e.g. “the”).
Moreover, the teacher can usefully present in class
some “model texts” with correctly used conjunctive and
reference ties. When the students are reading the model
texts, the teacher can highlight some conjunctions and
reference items that are perfectly matched with these
contexts. This type of focused reading activity will help
students become sensitive to the correct use of
conjunctive and reference ties in good English writing.
In the long run, improving the use of cohesive devices
in writing relies on students’ independent reading, since
the time available for teacher-guided reading activity is
inevitably limited. Normally knowledge and awareness
of how cohesive devices should be used in English writing
is obtained from scrutiny of such devices as used in good
English texts. However, Chinese students seem to be used
to skimming, i.e. reading the text for general ideas instead
of looking at details, because they are supposed to answer
several multiple-choice questions under each reading
passage within limited time both in reading
comprehension exercises and in examinations. The
neglect of essential text-forming elements—cohesive
devices—in reading practice more or less contributes to
students’ difficulty in using cohesive devices in writing.
Therefore it is necessary to guide students to form the
habit of reading texts as a whole rather than focusing on
the meaning of individual sentences, because only by
scrutinizing properly used cohesive devices in English
texts can students learn and internalize the way in which
cohesive devices should be used in English writing.
STETS Language & Communication Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003
8 | Feng Ting

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