Text Cohesion in English Scientific Texts Written by Saudi Undergraduate Dentistry Students: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Textual and Logical Relations in Oral Biology Texts

Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

doi:10.1177/21582440211032194

Abstract

This qualitative study examined multimodal cohesive devices in English oral biology texts by eight high-achieving Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the textual and logical cohesive devices in oral biology texts was conducted, employing Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion analysis scheme. The findings showed that students used varied cohesive devices: lexical cohesion, followed by reference and conjunctions. Although ellipsis was minimally employed in the oral biology texts, its discipline-specific uses emerged: the use of bullet points and numbered lists that facilitate recall. The SF-MDA of cohesion in multimodal semiotic resources highlighted the processes underlying construction of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of cohesive devices in oral biology texts. The results indicate that oral biology discourse is interdisciplinary, including a number of subfields in biology. The SF-MDA of pictorial oral biology representations indicates that they include instances of cohesive devices that illustrate and complement verbal texts. The results indicate that undergraduate students need to be provided with a variety of multimodal high-cohesion texts so that they can successfully extend underlying conceptual and logical meaning-making relations.

Highlights

In academic texts, use of cohesive devices contributes to text coherence between sentences, thereby facilitating comprehension and learning (Hall et al, 2014; Ozuru et al, 2009; Yuniartiah et al, 2018)
The results of textual cohesion analyses (Table 2) showed that the students used a variety of cohesive devices (14.02 devices per 100 words) in the eight oral biology texts
The findings indicate that oral biology texts intertwine various cohesive patterns and that the students used a range of cohesive devices

Summary

Introduction

Use of cohesive devices contributes to text coherence between sentences, thereby facilitating comprehension and learning (Hall et al, 2014; Ozuru et al, 2009; Yuniartiah et al, 2018). Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. The study is pertinent as in Saudi Arabia, the number of Saudi students enrolled in dentistry undergraduate programs has increased dramatically over the past 10 years. In 2016, for example, the number of Saudi students enrolled in the Bachelor of Science Dentistry program increased by 22.34%, from 9,883 to 12,091 (Saudi Ministry of Education, 2016). This study might provide insights for science tutors and undergraduate English-as-a-Foreign-Language/English-as-a-SecondLanguage (EFL/ESL) science students because it could shed light on practices and discourses that constitute well-constructed multimodal cohesive oral biology texts. To the best of my knowledge, this study is the first to explore how Saudi undergraduate dentistry students construct multimodal cohesive oral biology texts

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Conclusion