Articulation Theory for Chinese Non-English Majors in Applied Writing Barriers and How to Overcome the Problem

Writing is a part of the English language acquisition process that should not be overlooked. China's education has always attached great importance to one aspect. Whether it is the score of the writing part of the English part of the high school entrance examination or the score of the writing part of the fourth and sixth level exams in the university, it proves to a large extent the importance of the state. The grading criteria for CET-4 and CET-6 writing involve factors such as relevance, coherence and coherence, and language errors. The grading criteria for writing in the Graduate School Entrance Examination include whether the questions are completed, the use of rich vocabulary and grammatical structures, fluency in language, coherence in writing, the use of cohesion, correct formatting, and the achievement of the desired results. It can be seen that the cohesion and coherence of writing is one of the factors that affect the high score of writing. However, the data shows that there are still big problems in writing for non-English majors in China, and the connection problem is a relatively large aspect.

Cohesion refers to text connectedness in terms of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical collocation. The earliest articulation theory was born in a book by Halliday and Hassan, "Articulation in English", in which they divided articulation into five types: referential, substitution, elision, conjunction, and lexical cohesion, and summarized the first four as grammatical cohesion. Many studies of second language writing in China are based on these five articulation methods. Later, many scholars such as Hu Zhuanglin and Zhang Delu developed the articulation theory. In foreign countries, Crossley proposed that there are local cohesion, paragraph cohesion and discourse cohesion. Local cohesion refers to sentence-level cohesion, such as the repetition of connecting words between sentences and words between sentences. Paragraph articulation refers to the connection between paragraphs, such as the repetition of words between paragraphs in an article. Discourse cohesion involves the whole discourse, such as the proportion of pronouns to nouns in the whole discourse and the lexical diversity in the whole text. According to Meihua Liu's research, it is found that the main problem of Chinese non-English majors in connection is lexical devices, followed by reference and conjunction.

Among reference devices, pronouns is used most frequently, followed by the definite article ,the comparatives and the demonstratives. In pronouns, students are more likely to use the third person, especially demonstrative pronouns that indicate proximity, such as "this", "these". For example: Lily has bought a new bag. The "this" in this example sentence refers to the previous content "Lily has bought a new bag". There are three types of using reference devices: the shifted use of pronouns,omission or misuse of the definite article, and underuse of comparatives and overuse of the phrase “more and more”. This is mainly due to the transfer and interference of the mother tongue and the lack of proficiency in English.

Among the conjunction devices, additive devices are the most used, followed by causal, temporal, adversative and continuative devices, respectively. Among them, the most commonly used are "and", "also", "or", "but", "because of", "so", "first", "secondly" and other simple elementary words. Words or phrases like "on the contrary", "instead", "as a result", "sum up", "meanwhile", "all in all" are rarely used. ”This may imply that the students were not competent enough to use other cohesive items to indicate transition of meaning .For example: Having a rest can help us reduce stress. In addition, it can make us feel energetic. Influenced by their mother tongue, such as using "yue lai yue" to indicate change in Chinese, students will subconsciously use "more and more" when writing in English.

In lexical devices，repetition of the same word formed the highest percentage of use, lowed by collocation, synonym and antonym. Superordinates and general words were rarely used. Students are more likely to use words that appear in an essay or topic or that are closely related to the topic, such as "students", "teacher", "college", "computer". The problems with lexical devices mainly consists in a restricted choice of lexical items and the wrong use of collocation. Vocabulary is the trickiest part of learning any foreign language. The many and complex meanings of dictionaries and the variety of parts of speech of words have caused a lot of confusion for students. Advanced vocabulary is difficult to read and remember, and students are easily confined to elementary vocabulary that we learn from an early age and use a lot. In their daily study and life, students are rarely exposed to foreign language communication, and English courses are offered less time, especially writing courses and speaking courses, which students cannot apply and improve in practice. Most of the words that are exposed to in textbook learning have a single meaning, and it is impossible to form a complete understanding of this word. As a result, students rarely use synonyms, antonyms, superordinates and general word when writing.

In addition to this, there are two other important means of articulation: omission and substitution. Ellipsis can be divided into sentence elision, verb elision, and noun elision according to the omitted components; Substitution can be divided into noun substitution (one, ones, the same), verbal substitution (do, does, did) and clause substitution (so, not). This is mainly due to the lack of awareness among students.

To sum up, the students' cohesive devices are not strong enough, which can be summarized as follows. 1. College students do not understand the differences between Chinese and English language expressions. In terms of the use of pronouns, English pays more attention to the change of form in order to be concise, so pronouns are used extensively. However, the Chinese language is loosely structured and tends to use specific words rather than pronouns. 2. Students tend to ignore the differences between Chinese and English subjects. The subject in Chinese is mostly human, while the subject in English is mostly a thing, so the use of subjective words should be reduced in English argumentative essays. 3. There are many inflections in English, such as friend can be changed to friends, friendly, friend-ship, etc. It can be seen that the students did not master the inflections of various word forms, but chose other words, resulting in a low repetition rate of real words. 4. Students' awareness of discourse cohesion and coherence is not high, first of all, in the writing process, students pay more attention to grammar and vocabulary, and the awareness of discourse cohesion and coherence is weak. 5. Influenced by the thinking mode of the mother tongue and the negative transfer of the mother tongue. 6. Insufficient vocabulary accumulation.

In view of the above problems, students should first continue to accumulate vocabulary and improve their vocabulary in the future study, and they can try to use the root word to memorize words. Secondly, we must learn to compare the differences in the means of connection between English and Chinese, English writing is not a direct translation of Chinese, and the emergence of Chinese thinking should be avoided. You can transform your way of thinking in English by reading English works in depth, accumulating original English materials, connecting them with Chinese, and comparing the differences between them. Finally, students should also enhance their interest in English writing, master the skills of English writing, and improve their awareness of discourse cohesion.

Teachers should first understand the grading criteria of different writing tests in order to improve students' learning and performance level in a targeted manner. Secondly, students should understand the differences between Chinese and English. For example, Chinese conjunctions are used less, while English conjunctions are used more; Chinese flow sentences are used a lot, and English uses subordinate clauses and compound sentences. Students should also be helped to clarify the use of pronouns to prevent confusion about the person's pronouns, which may make the text difficult to understand. Encourage students to read extensively, and guide students to use word meaning transformation and English-English paraphrasing to understand the text. Secondly, teachers should fully explain the knowledge of cohesion to students, grasp the logic and meaning of the discourse from the discourse level, rather than understanding the words, words and sentences in the discourse in isolation, and be able to effectively grasp the structure and logical relationship of the discourse, focusing on teaching students the structure of the discourse and how to connect the discourse, rather than allowing students to learn and accumulate by themselves, so as to cultivate students' awareness of discourse cohesion and strengthen the training of writing cohesion in the teaching process. It can be a combination of peer evaluation and teacher evaluation. Second, teachers should consciously combine reading and writing, and guide students to write or write after reading by assigning reading materials. Thirdly, in daily teaching, teachers should emphasize the morphological conjugation of vocabulary to attract students' attention. Finally, it cultivates students' critical writing thinking, exercises students' logical thinking ability, and improves their writing skills.