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Chapter1 Introduction

The chapter will provide a general introduction to the background of this paper,present the purpose and significance of this research as well. The overall organization ofthis paper will also be illustrated in the chapter.

11 The Background of the Study
Being regarded as one of the four most important language skills (listening,speaking, reading and writing), writing a composition is a creative mental processwhich can reflect the objective world, express people’s deep thoughts and feelings, andpass down knowledge and information to the next generation easily.As Walters (Walters,1983) points out, writing is the last and perhaps the most difficult skill that studentslearn. Only the kind of person who have acquired and flexibly apply solid languageskills, including words, phrase, tense, grammar, sentence structure, logic, etc. , can becalled good writers who can produce logical and eloquent articles. Since the highrequirements of writing an English composition, it often is used as an important meansof measurement to examine students’English proficiency level.According to the requirement of College English Syllabus, the TEM4 studentsshould write essays no less than 150 word within 35 minutes according to the giventopic, an outline, a certain topic, tables or illustrations. They are required to write thepassages being logically structured, fluently expressed and clearly with few errors.Writing can improve students’ accuracy and proficiency of English. The knowledge andskills such as syntax, diction, spelling, punctuation and cohesion are required by thestudents when they write high-quality compositions.
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1. 2 The Significance of the Study
Although writing plays an important role in learning and teaching English,writing is still not emphasized during the process of teaching or learning English inChina. Instead, much attention is put on the form of words and the grammatical errors,and cohesion device applied in writings are ignored sometimes. Based on cohesiontheory by Halliday (1976) and Hoey (1991), the author also learned some studies madeby scholars including Chinese scholars and foreign scholars. Based on the previousstudies and theories, the author tried to explore the factors influencing the application oflexical cohesion in TEM4 writings of English major students, and the relation between the errors made by the learners and the lexical cohesion applied by the students. On thebasis of these theories, in order to find a much easier way to learn how to use lexicalcohesive ties into college students’writing. There are the significance of the study：Firstly, this study put emphasis on the lexical cohesion in TEM4 Writings, trying togive some implications for college English writing teaching by analyzing the lexicalcohesive devices used in the compositions and uncovering the characteristics of thelexical cohesive devices in their writings. The requirement is put forward to the teacherswho should consciously increase the explanations and exercises of cohesive devices,especially, lexical cohesion, to develop and improve students writing ability in usingwords flexibly and appropriately in different contexts.Secondly, differing from the early studies that mainly concentrate on illustratingthe relationship between lexical cohesive devices and writing quality, the present studybased on detecting the distribution and relation between lexical cohesive tie