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


Demonstrative and pronoun reference in MA theses and research articles

Before jumping into the discussion of the characteristics of the two corpora in detail, let us look at the whole set of data. For ease of reference, the reference items for the item types are repeated here from Figure 9. The lexical items in Figure 9 were the ones searched. Figure 21 shows the total number of times these items occurred in each corpus, with the averages of normalized frequency counts. The greatest difference between MA theses and RAs appears to be in the frequency of the definite article, which in the RA corpus is lower than in either category of theses. Contrary to this, other kinds of demonstratives, which lend the opportunity for more specific reference, appear more often in RAs. As for adverbials, there is no notable difference. What is again interesting is that RA writers use much fewer pronouns than thesis writers. This is especially obvious looking at the category of singular pronouns (he, him, his, she, her, hers) with less than half as many pronouns used in RAs as in either lower or higher rated theses.

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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