Investigating the use of grammatical cohesive devices in Algerian EFL students’ essays
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Date
2022
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Université De Larbi Ben M’hidi Oum EL Bouaghi
Abstract
EFL university students are required to have good writing skills and produce well-developed essays for their academic success. Good essays are not merely a set of random sentences and ideas put together; they are rather linguistic units. Essays ought to have a smooth flow of ideas and unity between sentences. Grammatical cohesive devices are regarded as crucial to help establish the smooth flow of ideas and the logical organization of sentences. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the use of grammatical cohesive devices used by Algerian EFL third year students at the department of English at L'arbi Ben M'hidi University. To achieve this aim, a deep analysis of these grammatical ties, used in thirty written essays, is conducted. The frequencies of the four categories of the grammatical cohesive devices in the corpus were demonstrated using AntConc software. The data were classified according to Halliday & Hasan (1976) taxonomy. The results showed that third years students use some grammatical cohesive devices extensively; there is no diversity in terms of use of the devices used. This might be due to the lack of knowledge, familiarity and awareness of these crucial linguistic ties. Consequently, some pedagogical implications are provided, and some suggestions for further research are proposed.
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Keywords
Grammatical Cohesive Devices, Essay Writing, Third year EFL students