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


The reliability of RCA at Stage 2

Perhaps the most exciting part of this stage of our investigation of references in RAs is checking the reliability of the analysis. The reason why it is so interesting is that comparison of the results of reference in longer texts has been nearly impossible up to this point. As pointed out in Chapter 5 of this book, Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) analysis was not possible to work with when it came to longer texts, comparing several analyses was even more complicated. In the present form of the analytical tool for Referential Cohesion Analysis, chains of reference are represented by columns in an Excel table. This representation made the comparison of several analyses of the same text easily comparable. A fellow researcher from the PhD program, Ildikó Szendrői, was kind enough to devote a great amount of time to analyzing RA3 in my RA corpus, which made it possible to check inter-coder reliability. The text of RA3 is 153 sentences long; one of us identified 205, the other 236 cohesive ties are organized in reference chains, of which 26 were exactly the same in our analyses. In the remaining 13 chains there were a number of differences. The two analyses were copied into one table with identical or similar chains in parallel, thus the ratio of identical ties could be counted, the result of which is an 85.2% match. This result is much more convincing than results at Stage 1 with the abstracts, where only 54% of the ties were identified by both raters and only 18% of the ties were analyzed consistently in the same way.

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