Cohesion and Coherence in the Writings of Iranain EFL Students

Mohammad Ali Arab Zouzani

doi:10.24297/jal.v2i1.2007

Abstract

This study was conducted in to investigate the relationship of cohesive chains and chain interaction to the coherence of texts. To do this, the following procedure was followed. First, 95 EFL students were asked to write a composition on a particular topic. These texts were scored by three experienced raters based on their perceived degree of coherence. The texts were then ordered from high to low. Thirty high-rated texts were labeled as group A, and thirty low-rated texts were labeled as group B. These texts were analyzed for the presence and frequency of cohesive chain and chain interaction based on the model proposed by Hassan (1989). After collecting the data and statistically analyzing them, the results showed that the texts getting higher coherence scores had a higher proportion of relevant tokens to peripheral ones and a higher proportion of central tokens to non-central ones in comparison to the low-rated texts. Therefore, cohesive chain and chain interaction can be used as an indicator of coherence and has pedagogical and theoretical implications.

Highlights

Turning to the history of linguistics, we can see that before Chomsky, the structuralist view of language, taking the sound system of language as the pivot of its studies was dominant
Many scholars proposed a need to study 'the rules of use'; which means, what language users really produce is not sentences in isolation, but discourse units in context (Apple & Mysekn, 1987; Leech, 1983; Hymes, 1972). Such an approach brings into consideration a number of issues which did not receive much attention into the formal linguistic description of structural syntax and semantics
An attempt was made to find out the possible relation between the coherence score of texts with the cohesive chains and chain interaction realized in the texts

Summary

Introduction

Turning to the history of linguistics, we can see that before Chomsky, the structuralist view of language, taking the sound system of language as the pivot of its studies was dominant. Many scholars proposed a need to study 'the rules of use'; which means, what language users really produce is not sentences in isolation, but discourse units in context (Apple & Mysekn, 1987; Leech, 1983; Hymes, 1972). Such an approach brings into consideration a number of issues which did not receive much attention into the formal linguistic description of structural syntax and semantics. Coherence is underlying semantic relations, which turns the words, sentences, or propositions into a unified, understandable whole, and is achieved by interpreting each individual sentence and relating these interpretations to one another (Witte & Faigley, 1981 ; Van Dijk, 1977). Cohesion as 'surface-level ties' link separate phrases, clauses, sentences, and even paragraphs into a unified discourse (Gumpers et al, in Tannen, 1984)

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