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


Cataphoric reference

The direction of reference was mainly a problem with the items that referred to the whole paper (the (present) study, this/the paper, this/the article, here, this work). One of the coders interpreted them as anaphorically referring to the title – she considered the title as the representation of the whole paper. The other did not include them as they are in a sense exophoric, pointing to the actual printed text. At this point, it is clear that the treatment of the title with different interpretations may lead to substantial differences in the analyses. To resolve this issue here, while reference of items referring to the paper itself will be understood as partly exophoric, these items also co-refer with each other and can in this way establish chains of reference pointing to a single entity. For the present analysis, it is reasonable to regard them as ties of reference. Additional arguments for this approach will come in Chapter 6 of this book, where, in the analysis of longer texts with a number of subsections, the orientation of the reader to various text segments in the co-text (that is, the surrounding textual context) will turn out to be an important aspect of texture.

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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