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


Research questions

The present study has three major aims: to design a new framework and analytical tool for Referential Cohesion Analysis (RCA); to justify the validity and reliability of the instrument for RCA through its implementation on a corpus of academic texts; to explore problem areas of novice writers and identify expert strategies in the use of reference to provide an empirical foundation for teaching this aspect of academic writing. These aims were accomplished through a series of five empirical studies, which focused both on piloting and refining the analytical tool used and on exploring cohesive reference in academic writing. This study uses a mixed approach and is built up from smaller-scale studies, which contributed to achieving the research aims in different ways. Although the study is largely exploratory in nature, at some stages of the research process, it was necessary to rely on hypotheses. Other stages were data-driven; that is, the analytical problems or emerging data provided the input for subsequent stages of research. Therefore, at this point, the research questions for the sequence of five smaller scale studies are listed here, but they will be supplemented with further questions and hypotheses in the relevant chapters discussing each.

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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