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


The Corpus: Research Papers

Two main sets of 40 texts were compared: 20 Research Articles (RAs) and 20 Master’s theses (MA theses). The MA thesis corpus is further subdivided into two sets of 10 higher rated and 10 lower rated texts, based on the final mark they received. The corpus was accumulated gradually through the previous stages (2–4 described in Sections 6 to 8), yet, as the analysis at each stage focused on different aspects, a full analysis of the corpus has not been carried out yet. The selection criteria for research papers to be included in the corpus have been described at the earlier stages; briefly, both RAs and MA theses were empirical papers from the field of applied linguistics written after the year 2000. The whole RA corpus is 143 083 words long, the full MA corpus is 315 578 words. For this part of the empirical study, the whole corpus was re-analyzed from beginning to end using a uniform method (described in Section 9.3).

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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