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

Some unexpected inconsistencies in the references in the corpus

Here, I only intend to highlight some outcomes concerning the difficulty of using clear references even for English expert authors. On average, the RAs in my corpus contained six vague items or ambiguities each. The most frequent referring items with vague referents were the results and the data. Many times, the antecedent (referent) was not clear when groups of participants were referred to: sometimes it was unclear which group or subgroup was being described. (Once the original published layout had to be checked: for the identification of the referent of these passages.) Vague references included items as: in the ways described above, in the initial stages. Once, the referent of an abbreviation with a definite article was missing. These ambiguous and vague references support the position that the usage of referring items in a way that all references are clear and the text is easy to follow is not only difficult for non-native writers, but for expert writers as well.

Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2024

ISBN: 978 963 664 049 1

Nyelvészet

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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