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

No referent in the textual context

Errors that related to the lack of referent in the theses involved either an item where it did not have a presupposed item in the text, or a plural noun with a definite article where the intended reference was generic. The latter type was more characteristic of low rated theses. This may be due to a proficiency problem: the writers of the theses might not be aware of the fact that plural nouns with definite articles are not used for generic reference and that using them that way can be misleading. Frequent examples of such items were, for example, the students, the teachers, the EFL classes and the foreigners. The lack of a specific presupposed item was almost equally likely to occur in both corpora. Two main reasons might lie behind this. One is that thesis writers tended to write in very vague and general terms about the study they were to explain in detail in subsequent sections of their paper, for example, some/most of the cases without specifying what cases are being discussed; the other skills without a description what they might be; or the questionnaires, the interviews, the school without any specification. In contrast, RA writers (and high-rated MA thesis writers) specify all the crucial details (e.g., type of research, research tools, participants or the location) very early in the article, either in the abstract or the introduction sections. The reason for not specifying such details could be the writers’ over-reliance on their audience’s familiarity with their research – it appeared that they only had their supervisor as an audience in mind.

Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2024

ISBN: 978 963 664 049 1

Nyelvészet

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//

BibTeX EndNote Mendeley Zotero