A Study of Non-structure Cohesion in the Texts in New Senior English for China Student’s Book 5 and 6

Abstract

Since the publication of Cohesive in English co-authored by Halliday and Hasan in 1976, more linguistics at home and abroad have been analyzing and studying this theory in detail. Thus, cohesion theory has been steadily growing. Existing studies, however, tended to focus on the analysis of cohesive devices in a variety of discourses other than the texts from English textbooks for Chinese high school learners. To address this gap, this study used 5 articles from New Senior English for China Student’s Book 5 and 6 to explore the non-structure cohesive devices. By means of the coding scheme suggested by Halliday and Hasan in 1976, the cohesive patterns in a text were represented. The results showed that coherence in the 5 texts largely depends on lexical cohesion. Then, a further analysis of the five lexical cohesive devices showed that among them, same item having reference that is identical proved to be the most in the texts. The main reasons is perhaps that since the texts are from school textbooks for Chinese teenagers, the student readers almost certainly do not have the ability to make much sense of a fairly complex text whose coherence may largely depends on substitution or ellipsis.