Gabriella Jenei

Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing

A descriptive and exploratory theory- and corpus-based study of the text-organizing role of reference in written academic discourse


Reliability at Stage 3

Referential Cohesion Analysis with the supplementary non-cohesive taxonomy was used here for the analysis of two corpora. Reliability of the analysis was ensured by the analysis of one RA by two coders (reliability was measured the same way as in Stage 2), with a higher percentage of inter-coder agreement (89%) than at the earlier stage of the analysis (85.2%), which means that this analysis supports the assumption that considering non-cohesive items enhances the reliability of the analysis. The overlap between the author’s two analyses of the same text was 96%. Differences in the intra-coder analyses were mainly due to ambiguities (with most of the differences appearing in the categorization of exophoric items), and to assigning different presupposed elements to a few items in the cohesive table. The other coder also reported difficulty in identifying the subcategories of non-cohesive items. In fact, the specific sub-categories are useful in identifying where specific items belong, for pedagogical purposes – or otherwise, more efficient Referential Cohesion Analysis – the use of the five main categories is recommended – keeping the subcategories and examples for clarity. Problematic items were marked in the analyses and will again be discussed in connection with the errors found in the MA papers (Section 7.6.5).

Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing

Tartalomjegyzék


Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2024

ISBN: 978 963 664 049 1

This monograph aims to contribute to the study of written discourse and to writing pedagogy within the field of teaching English for academic purposes. The study has both a theoretical and an empirical focus. Due to the lack of an analytical tool available for the reliable cohesive reference analysis of extended texts, to explore the patterns of referential cohesion in research papers, it has been necessary to develop a new analytical tool. In practice, the study advances the theory of cohesion analysis by refining the cohesive reference-related aspects of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of cohesion to transform it into a reliable and valid analytical tool for cohesive reference analysis in academic discourse in particular. The analytical tool is then applied to present a corpus-based comparative analysis of research articles and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writers’ MA theses. This is accomplished by a multi-stage investigation, using quantitative and qualitative approaches at every stage to ensure that quantitative data is supported by qualitative insights and vice versa. The present empirical study points out considerable differences regarding the cohesive reference patterns among research articles produced by expert writers and the subcorpora of high- and low-rated theses by novice EFL writers. A major outcome of the investigation is that it yields significant pedagogical implications for both teachers and learners of academic writing: provides clues for the design of tasks for the development of the relevant aspects of EFL discourse competence together with additional practical activities for a variety of applications of the theory-based analytical tool.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/jenei-referential-cohesion-in-academic-writing//

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