Lexical Cohesion of Sino-British College Students’ EAP Writing

Abstract

English becomes an important tool of academic research and international communication with the rapid development of global economy. Producing a piece of EAP writing with completeness, clarity and coherence has become a pursuit of both college students and academic staff. The coherence and completeness of EAP writing is realized mainly by lexical cohesion. However, it has long been ignored by Chinese EFL learners and teachers. Using the corpora of BAWE and EAP writing by British and Chinese learners, this research compares and contrasts the indices of lexical cohesion generated by computational linguistics tool, Coh-Metrix, across different levels and between English native speakers and Chinese EFL learners. It is found that both native speakers and Chinese EFL learners tends to use less simple repetition and more complicated cohesion with the improving of English language proficiency while the average frequency of lexical cohesion employed by Chinese EFL learners is less than native speakers. Therefore lexical cohesion teaching and learning should be given more consideration for successful EAP writing for Chinese EFL learners.