The Use of Cohesive Devices in Students’ Writing Essays. A Case of Third Year students’ Foreign Languages at Moussaoui Mohamed and Krim Belkacem High Schools
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Date
2018
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
The present study investigates the use of cohesive devices in students’ writing essays. It aims at reaching three main objectives. The first one is to check whether students are familiar with using cohesive devices when they write. The second one aims at exploring the influence of using CDS in writing essays. The last objective aims at investigating the most predominant cohesive devises used by students. In order to meet these objectives, Halliday and Hasan’s theory ‘Cohesion in English’ (1976) has been used as a theoretical framework. In conducting this research and gain a better understanding of the phenomenon, a mixed method approach has been adopted as a research methodology for both gathering and analyzing data. Our corpus consists of eighty (80) essays written by third year students foreign languages stream at Krim Belkacem and Moussaoui Mohamed high schools, during the academic year 2017/2018. In addition, a questionnaire has been distributed to forty (40) learners. For the interpretation of the data, SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) is used to elicit numerical data and a Qualitative Content Analysis theory is adopted to interpret and explain the qualitative data. Moreover, the rule of three is used to quantify the number of cohesive devices used by the students. The results of the study showed that 944 cohesive devices are used in the writing pieces. According to the findings, students have used particular types of cohesive device, this mainly appears in the use of conjunctions and references because they are the most known. However, the problem in using certain cohesive devices is due to the little use of ellipsis and substitution in which they have little experience. Hence, the findings obtained in this study confirm a set of hypotheses and refute some others.
Description
63p.:ill;30cm.(+cd)
Keywords
cohesive devices, linguistic ties, discourse
Citation
Didactique des Langue Etrangères