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


Vague reference to co-text

Writing an MA thesis is in some ways more demanding than writing an RA, by virtue of the fact that it is longer. Experienced writers will know that having more space to deliver some message does have its benefits, nevertheless, with more space, the difficulty of signposting, that is, keeping the reader informed about where the discussion is headed becomes more cumbersome. Familiarity with RAs does not help the novice writer in this respect. RAs contain fewer sections than MA theses; the phrases used to point to the co-text will cause no interpretative difficulty (e.g., this section, the previous / next / following section: altogether 44 instances in the RA corpus). In MA theses novice writers tend to refer to sections as chapter (50 instances), part (23), section (207), subsection (3) with similar modifiers to what RA writers use. Often, due to the length of the text, in MA theses, these modifiers are not specific enough to determine what the referred text part is (whether the next part means the next section or several of the sections, for example). LTH4 shows an attempt to orient the reader. The six successive sentences from the introduction of the thesis seem to add more confusion than guidance to the text (only sentence extracts are shown to illustrate this point):

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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