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 first version of the analytical tool

Around the turn of the millennium, there has been a large increase in building up corpora for various purposes, and at the same time, several tools have been developed for their annotation and exploration. These tools are usually designed for tracking lexical and grammatical features (e.g., WordNet: Teich & Fankhauser, 2005; Coh-Metrix: Dufty et al., 2004, Green, 2012; TOPIC system: Benbrahim & Ahmad, 1994). Textual features that require background knowledge for interpretation, such as referential cohesion, are presently not possible to analyze automatically, as the antecedents of referring items can be of any length anywhere in the preceding text. Besides, the representation of cohesive reference is the reflection of one person’s – the analyst’s – interpretation of a text. While manual discourse analysis is extremely time-consuming, it can be supported by automating some parts of such an 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//

BibTeXEndNoteMendeleyZotero

Kivonat
fullscreenclose
printsave