Investigating EFL students' problems in using coherent and cohesive devices in academic writing from a discourse analysis perspective
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Date
2017
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university of Oum- El- Bouaghi
Abstract
This Study aims at investigating students' problems in using coherent and cohesive devices from discourse analysis perspective. The corpus consists of 23 argumentative essays that were analyzed on the basis of Halliday and Hassan (1976) cohesion framework. The corpus was evaluated manually by undertaking two main steps. Firstly, all the types and the subtypes of both grammatical and lexical cohesive devices are calculated. Secondly, there was focus on the appropriate and inappropriate use of the cohesive ties employed by the students. The data obtained shows that the students used all the types of the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices along with their subtypes. The students relied heavily on the grammatical cohesive devices (GCDs) by employing 1003 items, regardless of the significant difference between the frequencies of its subtypes. They used referential items 56%, tailed by conjunctive ties 35%, while substitutional and elliptical ones stand for 6% and 3%. On the other hand, lexical cohesive devices (LCDs) were employed 341 times. Reiteration items represent 94%, whereas collocation exemplifies only 6% from the total use of the LCDs. The outcomes of the analysis also showed the problems that the students encountered; they were mostly misuse, overuse and ambiguity.
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Keywords
Academic writing, Investigating, Analyse du discours