Descriptive statistics and non-parametric correlation analysis revealed that cohesive devices were positively associated with appropriate use to create texture however, they only weakly correlated with the test scores. A cohesion index was, therefore, developed to investigate how cohesive devices created texture in the sample texts and correlated with the test scores. Assuming cohesion as a measure of writing quality, the present study chose samples of academic writing which did not specify cohesion as a descriptor in the assessment scale. Any dichotomy between the assessment criteria and the construct of writing or between the assessment criteria and test scoring procedures can produce unreliable and invalid interpretations of the students' writing proficiency. Summative assessment of students' writing predicts not only the extent to which the course learning objectives have been achieved but also reveals the relevance of the assessment design with the construct of writing being assessed. This study recommends that EFL teachers provide Saudi EFL students several cohesive tools in order to help them improve their writing skills and connect their ideas smoothly. Furthermore, Pearson's correlation coefficient found a relationship between the students' writing scores and length of their essays, the use of cohesive ties and the scores, and cohesive ties and the length of the students' essays. Saudi EFL undergraduate students tended to repeatedly stay focused on the central idea of the topic. The results show that the most frequently used device was lexical cohesion, specifically repetition. The IELTS writing assessment scale was also used to evaluate the students' writing scores.
#COHESION AND COHERENCE IN WRITING SOFTWARE#
The NVivo qualitative data analysis software and the corpus analysis (conducted using AntConc) were used to calculate the frequencies of each cohesive device found in the data. Moreover, each of their subcategories were analyzed in the students' texts. The five types of the cohesive devices are the following: lexical cohesion, reference, conjunction, substitutions, and ellipses. It uses a mixed method approach, where the students' essays were analyzed using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in terms of the textual meta-function of cohesive devices. This study aims to investigate how frequently Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesive devices were used as well as their relationship with the writing quality of 100 Saudi EFL undergraduate students in Al Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Concomitant with this review a brief account of the cohesive devices model that was espoused by the majority of the studies addressed in this paper. This paper seeks to serve three purposes: 1) To critically survey the empirical studies conducted on cohesive devices, 2) to identify the problematic practices that led to the chaotic status, and 3) to propose a host of practices that can be followed in future research done on cohesive devices. On a cautious note, while it is acknowledged that variance is imbued with research purposes, variance can be the product of certain flaws in the research design. The analysis of the research practices found that the dominant feature of the reviewed studies is incompatibility. The research practices of the reviewed papers have been analysed, compared and contrasted, and evaluated apropos the research design, methodology, literature review and findings. These research studies have been categorised based on the foci of the research questions and the genres to which the analysed texts belong. This study has as its main goal exploring the possibility of benefiting from the chaotic status that permeates discourse analysis research done on cohesive devices since their inception by Halliday and Hasan (1976).
0 kommentar(er)
