Abstract
The notion of “textuality” encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether “cohesion” was a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text was a structural unit or not or even if there were semantic or structural relationships within a text. Cohesion was like the glue that unified the meaning within a text through binding the textual elements. Tackling relations of meaning and references in a text was often related to cohesion. A text can be cohesive if its units were bound together with explicit or implicit relations. Cohesion was often defined as the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which provide links between various parts of a text. The units of a cohesive text were not just a random set of sentences. Writing section on IELTS was commonly considered one of the most difficult parts of test. The test takers cannot even understand what to do with the tasks provided. They eventually wrote without knowing the expected direction. Therefore, there should be a fast way to equip students well to successfully cope with such hindrances. This research was an action research report of 10 students to make them better understand and answer writing tasks on IELTS test by employing probing techniques as one of test taking strategies. As the result, teaching material about cohesive devices, according to criteria and references to IELTS writing task 2, could help students to understand of their logic on writing proper materials.
Highlights
For EFL students, text understanding is of great importance for academic success
A paired sample t-test was administered to evaluate the effect of taught materials on the cohesive device to see whether there is an improvement on the scores of International English Language Tests System (IELTS) writing task 2
One of the biggest mistakes made by IELTS candidates is using cohesive devices they do not know
Summary
For EFL students, text understanding is of great importance for academic success. Their academic achievements are based on their knowledge of the contents of the textbooks available to their needs. Beyond the grammar and lexis of language, understanding the mechanisms for how text is structured is the basis for his work.Cohesion is one aspect of the study of texture, which can be defined as the procedure whereby meaning is diverted into an absorbable amount of discourse “instead of spilling out shapelessly in every possible direction” (Halliday: 1994). It seems necessary that candidates' performance to be scrutinized based on IELTS marking system and under simulated IELTS examination conditions to have a better understanding of the blocking problems causing the yield of low scores These problems appear to be in direct relation with the conditions under which the test is taken and the writing grading system of IELTS. Students typically can use ‘because’ quite but ‘because of’ can cause problems if not practiced
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