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


Focus: testing the validity and reliability of Halliday and Hasan’s taxonomy

The aim of this section is to test the validity and reliability of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) cohesion analysis method in a pilot study, which is Stage 1 in the process of developing an analytical tool for Referential Cohesion Analysis (see Chapter 4, Table 10). With this aim in mind, a brief introduction of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy is necessary, as so far it has been most used to analyze cohesion in written discourse analysis research. This taxonomy was ground-breaking work at the time. Besides providing a comprehensive typology of markers of cohesion in texts, it suggested a “method for the analysis of cohesion in a text” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, 329); however, there is no data about the reliability of its application to texts of the length of a research article. The description of this method of analysis is thus followed by a study of 10 RA abstracts to test the validity and reliability of the part of this method of cohesion analysis that is relevant for our present purposes, the analysis of referential cohesion. Similar descriptions of reference (e.g., Biber et al., 1991) will help restructure the taxonomy and clarify dubious cases. Based on the results of this study, the last Section (5.7) of this Chapter discusses questions that emerged during the validation study and endeavors to find ways to overcome theoretical and methodological problems to devise a framework specifically for Referential Cohesion Analysis.

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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