Cohesion

This study aims to understand certain linguistic and semantic resources for the text construction, namely the constructs of cohesion, coherence. The analysis of cohesive ties was conducted on the writing samples of 40 subjects (20 most coherent and 20 least coherent) Iranian undergraduates of English. This prompted us to identify the dominant types of cohesive devices used in most coherent writing samples. The analysis of data revealed that both the writing samples were found highly dense in the use of reference. The correlation analysis also didn’t show any overlap between the referential ties and coherence.. Hence, we can claim that referential ties don’t play any role in making a text coherent. Among the five major types of cohesive classes, substitution and ellipsis were found least frequently used in both the writing samples. Their occurrence was less than 1%. It, therefore, seems that the two types of cohesive devices aren’t widely used in written discourse. In the collective data, since, their occurrence is not even noticed in any of the writing scripts where as they could be the most dominant type of cohesion of spoken discourse.

This study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in English and Persian abstracts of Iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. For this purpose, one hundred English and Persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on Seddigh and Yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Halliday’s (1985) taxonomies. For contrastive analysis, the SPSS package was used. The results revealed some similarities and differences in the use of lexical cohesion sub-categories in the parallel English and Persian texts. The occurrence of all sub-types is nearly the same in the two groups of texts and the two- tailed t-test employed showed that the differences are not statistically significant. Both languages exhibit a general tendency in using repetition, but synonymy and meronymy are the least used sub-categories. Regarding the density of the texts, the analysis indicates that Persian abstracts are denser than their corresponding English ones.

This study explored the effect of teaching Self-Regulated Strategy on the writing accuracy and cohesion of Iranian EFL learners. In so doing, this study followed the SRS instruction model, using a transition word chart, examples, and a graphic organizer. To achieve the objectives, 50 intermediate Iranian EFL learners participated in this study. The design was experimental which used a proficiency, pretest-posttest and random sampling. The analyses of writing tests in the control and experimental groups revealed that SRS instruction had a positive impact on the participants’ writing ability. The effect of SRS instruction was significant on the participants’ writing accuracy and cohesion. The findings draw language instructors’ attention to the meta-cognitive dimension of writing and importance of teaching self-regulatory strategies as a way for achieving autonomy in writing.

The main concern of this study was to identify Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ problems in cohesion and coherence of writing performance as well as the extent to which they utilized cohesion and coherence in their writing. It is important for EFL and ESL learners the ability to compose a piece of descriptive text. Despite its significance, there is a gap in the literature about how Iranian EFL learners write essays in this genre that this study intends to fill. The research design involved the utilization of mixed research method in addressing the research questions. The study addressed a corpus of 40 intermediate language learners’ descriptive essays, 10 experienced teachers that they were themselves at intermediate level as the questionnaire respondents and four interviewees’ answers from those volunteer experienced teachers. The results of the study revealed lack of cohesion and coherence in the participants’ essays and their writing performance in terms of these two variables was not acceptable. Therefore, the obtained findings, by implication, indicated that they had neither some aspects of cohesive and coherent writing, nor had enough support, practice and feedback on their written text in terms of cohesion and coherence. Some pedagogical implications of this study would be applicable to the language learners’ writing in terms of these two aforementioned variables as well as the results were expected to aid in setting the writing sections of classes for improvement of language learners’ written texts particularly in terms of cohesion and coherence.

Les deux notions fondamentales dans le domaine de la linguistique textuelle sont : la cohésion et la cohérence. Ces deux notions entrent à la fois dans la production du texte et dans son interprétation. Alors, comment s’organise un texte ? Quelles sont les règles de la cohérence textuelle ? Quelle différence y a-t-il entre la cohérence et la cohésion ? Comment mieux interpréter un texte à la lumière de ces règles ? Telles sont les questions qui seront débattues au cours de notre communication. Au fil de notre travail, nous allons nous référer à la conception de différents linguistes tels que : Michel Charolles, Jacques Fontanille, Lita Lundquist et Dominique Maingueneau. En effet, on peut dire que la cohérence est une condition textuelle qui nécessite des rapports logiques et non-contradictoires entre les différentes phrases du texte, elle se rattache principalement à la signification générale de la totalité du texte, selon Michel Charolles (cf. Introduction aux problèmes de la cohérence des textes, 1978), quatre règles régissent cette propriété du texte et qui sont : la règle de répétition, la règle de la progression de l’information, la règle de non-contradiction et la règle de relation. A son tour, La pédagogue danoise Lita Lundquist distingue entre trois niveaux de cohérence : un niveau thématique, un niveau sémantique et un niveau pragmatique. Dans cet article, nous essayerons de relier les trois niveaux de cohérence établis par Lita Lundquist avec les quatre principes de la cohérence établis par Michel Charolles pour mettre en place un modèle d’analyse textuelle qui pourrait nous faciliter l’interprétation et la réception d’un texte littéraire quel qu’il soit. En ce qui concerne la cohérence thématique, nous allons étudier les procédés de répétition ainsi que les trois types de progression. Pour ce qui est de la cohérence sémantique, nous allons parler de la méta-règle de non-contradiction chez Michel Charolles. Quant à la cohérence pragmatique, nous allons présenter sa quatrième règle de la cohérence à savoir : la règle de relation.

The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between cohesive readability of expository texts and reading comprehension in EFL students with different proficiency levels. One hundred students formed the participant of this study. They were undergraduate students majoring in English at University of Isfahan. To collect the relevant data, participants were divided into three groups of low proficient, intermediate and high proficient based on their scores on an OPT proficiency test. A series of expository reading comprehension tests were prepared and their cohesive readability was measured through related programs. They were divided into two groups of authentic and manipulated texts, with the cohesive readability of manipulated texts reduced. The participants answered the related tests in one session. As a result of data analysis, the findings indicated that manipulation, i.e. cohesive readability reduction has a direct impact on the students' performance in reading expository texts. It was further revealed that text manipulation, i.e. reduction of cohesive readability, was more influential on the intermediate group, i.e. positive relationship between the students’ proficiency level and their reading comprehension of expository texts with different cohesive readability levels. 

Rhetorical structure is helpful in improving how the writers maintain cohesion in their writings. This study examines how the Iraqi writers maintain cohesion in the text by analyzing the various rhetorical moves in Azzaman, an online Iraqi newspaper. To this purpose, twelve opinion articles from Azzaman Iraqi newspaper, published from January 2013 to June 2013 were analyzed. The findings revealed a common rhetorical pattern: the introduction section, the intermediate section, and the coda section (conclusion stage). All these were frequently used, but the use of intermediate section (solution stage) and coda section (moral stage) were less frequently-used in comparison with the introduction section. The findings of this study reflect the way Iraqis write opinion articles in English newspapers, and generally show that the use of similar patterns in the rhetorical structure mirrors the writing of second language writers’ writing to convey information to second language readers.

This study focused mainly on the shifts of the grammatical cohesion in texts translated from English into Persian. It aimed to identify the grammatical cohesive devices (GCDs) in ST and TT separately, based on Halliday and Hassn's Model (1976), determine the number of occurrences of GCDs in two texts and finally, illustrate types of shifts of grammatical cohesion and strategies used in TT. To achieve these aims, a mixed-method (comparative and descriptive model) research design was used to spot cohesive shifts in TT due to translation, together with the employed strategies. To this purpose, the book, Oral Reproduction of Stories was investigated, with its translation. 39 different stories by different writers were selected as the sample of analysis. The results showed that the TT adopted all the three types of GCDs except verbal and casual substitution, with verbal substitution in Persian being carried down by reference, ellipsis and lexical cohesion. The occurrence of GCDs in the TT was more frequent than that of ST. Regarding the general analysis of the cohesion shifts, the study showed that three types of shifts (i.e. establishment of new cohesion, elimination of cohesion and change of type of cohesive features) occur in translation. Finally it was revealed that the translation strategies undertaken by the various translators are motivated and influenced by three factors (i. e. systemic language differences Baker (1992), stylistic preferences and the translation process itself (Blum- Kulka, 1986).

This study is a descriptive piece of research attempting to compare and contrast the use of two types of cohesive devices (i.e., lexical cohesion and ellipsis) in the original dialogues of a television series with the Persian subtitled and dubbed versions of the same dialogues. The data used in the study comprises the dialogues of 10 scenes randomly selected by the researcher from the television series Prison Break as well as the dubbed and subtitled counterparts of the dialogues of the same scenes. The study seeks two objectives: First, it attempts to investigate the original dialogues of the film in terms of the frequency of the use of the two mentioned types of cohesive devices and to compare them with the dubbed and subtitled versions; second, it aims to compare the two types of audio-visual translations (i.e., dubbing and subtitling) to find out how they have dealt with these cohesive devices and what difference exist between these two types of translation in terms of their handling lexical cohesion and ellipsis. For this purpose, the study employs the model proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976). Also, in order to determine the interrater reliability of the analyses, Chi Square test is conducted. The findings reveal that repetition has the greatest frequency of use among lexical cohesion elements and clausal ellipsis has the greatest frequency among ellipsis types in the original dialogues. The findings also demonstrate that the two translated versions are relatively similar in their handling lexical cohesion but the dubbed version contains a substantially greater number of cases of ellipsis than the subtitled version does. The findings of this paper could provide audiovisual translators with information as to how the cohesive elements are differently used in the English dialogues and their Persian translations (subtitled and dubbed dialogues).

This study aimed at investigating the L2 rhetorical organization of translation and free writing tasks in terms of cohesive devices used by Iraqi intermediate EFL learners in the narrative genre. To do so, 30 Iraqi intermediate EFL learners at Kufa university took part in the study. The participants were asked to translate three narrative texts from Arabic to English and write three narratives related to the general topics given to them as prompts. The narratives were coded and rated by two experts based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework. The data obtained from translation narratives were compared with a standard translation for each text. Results of the one-sample t-test performed on the scores of translation narratives indicated that Iraqi leaners produce shorter passages in the target language than in the source language; however, they used significantly more times than expected for certain types of cohesive devices. Moreover, comparisons between translated narratives and free narratives indicated no significant difference between the translated and composed narratives. It is argued that patterns of cohesive devices used in English output of the Iraqi EFL learners are compatible with properties of their first language. The findings also show that, unlike English grammatical properties, cohesive devices are not a problematic area and would not lead to fossilized errors in the performance of Iraqi EFL learners.