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
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10. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
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10.2. Teaching and learning to use reference in academic writing
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10.2.2. Identification of self-contained units

10.2.2. Identification of self-contained units

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Concerning the overall structure of a paper, it is clear from both the method of RCA and the findings of Stages 4 and 5 that novice writers need to be able to identify whether or not a given textual unit (sentence, paragraph or section) is self-contained (i.e. it does not need reference to another item in the text for its interpretation) or it contains a cohesive reference that needs resolution. The following tasks aim at EFL students’ practicing this distinction.

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IN-CLASS TASK 3/A: For enhancing students’ awareness of self-contained units it is very easy to design a short task, which might even be a 10-minute warmer at a lesson. After a clarification of the concept of cohesive reference, students might get a list of sentences with increasing complexity from each typical section of an academic paper (Introduction, Review of the Literature, Methods, Discussion, Conclusions) and be asked to decide whether each can be interpreted on its own or not. If it cannot, the kind of presupposed element should be supplied by the student.
IN-CLASS TASK 3/B: Importantly, the approach in TASK 3/A can be applied to paragraph-level extracts, where again, students need to decide if there is a referential connection between two paragraphs or they are independent from each other.
IN-CLASS TASK 4: Another awareness-raising activity would be giving students pairs of sentences, where one sentence comes from an RA and another one from a student text. Both sentences should have the same intended purpose or topic (e.g., presenting information about participants in a piece of research). This would also give students an opportunity to compare typical expert sentences that realize novice writers’ intentions in a more efficient way.

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Expert writers are more likely to use self-contained units instead of complex cohesive chains, which results in a text that is more easily interpretable. Sections of texts produced by experts are more likely to be interpretable as separate units. In order to reinforce this approach to writing, students may be encouraged to write up their assignments in separate sections, which forces them to see the structure of their essays or thesis papers as a composite of units that are interpretable in themselves. This segmentation is becoming increasingly relevant with interned-based research – where the abundance of information necessitates quick accessibility of fragments of text.
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