The Lexical Cohesion of Outstanding Compositions in Primary School Students and Related Teaching Suggestions

Cohesion is a means of linking sentences within a discourse. It can be classified as grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion uses different vocabularies and reproducing as a means of linking, which is the entry point for studying cohesion ability and vocabulary size. How to teach students to link concepts organically has always been a major problem in writing teaching. The objective of this research is to understand the lexical cohesion method and vocabulary size of excellent essays of primary school students, and to make corresponding teaching suggestions. The research method is to extract 2 award-winning compositions each from 10 influential competitions for primary school students (20 in total) in China; then analyse the types and functions of the lexical cohesion method, and count the lexical cohesion density of the works and the frequency of each type of lexical cohesion method; finally put forward related teaching suggestions. The results demonstrate that (1) the lexical cohesion density of award-winning works is very high; (2) repetition is the most common lexical cohesion method; (3) the vocabulary sizes of award-winning pupils have room to increase. Teaching suggestions include: (1) through ‘Detailed Reading’ to assist students accumulating vocabulary; (2) utilize ‘Joint Rewriting’ to teach lexical cohesion method.

Keywords

primary school composition lexical cohesion vocabulary size writing teaching suggestions discourse function

source

International Journal of Chinese Language Education; Jun 2022; Issue No. 11; p.83 - 98

Publisher

Department of Chinese Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong
Chinese Language Program, Columbia University
Chung Hwa Book Co. (H.K.) Ltd.

Language

Chinese

ISSN

2520-7733 (Print); 2521-4241 (Online)