A corpus- based analysis of grammatical cohesive devices in master thesis abstracts
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Date
2020
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Oum-El-Bouaghi
Abstract
An abstract is a short summary of all the major elements in research report which allows the reader to get the main information without reading the whole document. Since, it is a significant part of an academic writing that will be read by educational people, the writing of an abstract, therefore should be as clear as possible and the logical relation among sentences is coherent and cohesive. This can be realized by using grammatical cohesive devices. Accordingly, with respect to L'Arbi Ben M'hidi University, the present study aims to analyze the use of grammatical cohesive devices in the abstract section. To achieve this end, a contextual analysis of these devices is carried out on a corpus comprised of 20 abstract sections drawn from language science master thesis. Then, the frequencies of the various types of grammatical cohesive devices across the corpus were recorded using AntConc, a robust computational toolkit. After gathering the data, they were classified according to Halliday & Hasan (1976) taxonomy. The interpretation of the results shows that 2nd year master students used some grammatical cohesive devices repeatedly and ignored others. Consequently, this low of proficiency is reflected to the limited vocabulary of most students on one hand, and to the little importance teachers gave to these cohesive ties on the other hand. On the basis of these findings, a number of pedagogical implications are offered and suggestions for further research are proposed.
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Keywords
Grammatical cohesive device, Corpus analysis, Abstract