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


Product and process approaches to teaching writing

In a process-oriented approach, classroom use of L2 texts serve as sources of ideas or starting points for discussions in the “exploration and exploitation” (Leki, 1991, 136) of students’ own mental resources to construct their own texts. Envisioning the process on the level of the individual, Macken-Horaric (2002) describes the three-stage teaching-learning cycle in writing instruction, which involves: modelling, joint negotiation of text and independent construction. Horowitz (1986) criticizes the process approach to teaching academic writing, claiming that its inductive orientation may not be suitable for all the academic tasks and all the writers. The process approach entails learners’ having to write a number of drafts, and use peer-evaluation, which “may leave students with an unrealistic view of their abilities” (Horowitz, 1986, 446). He stresses that this preoccupation with the writer’s mental processes and disregard of the context, or the discourse community may not enable the writer to come up to requirements outside the context of a classroom. Therefore, the skills taught to students should be transferable as much as possible to other academic contexts.

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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