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A comparative analysis of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in authentic texts in English

Although this book is aimed primarily at EFL teachers, and is therefore framed in largely pedagogical terms, its original research component lies in its detailed study of the coherent processing of text components larger than the sentence, demonstrating that this processing requires more than just the interpretation of the individual sentences. More precisely, it researches the difficulty faced by foreign learners in making sense of authentic texts such as newspaper reports and short stories stemming from failure to interpret the writer’s cohesive signals as intended; lack of practice in applying ‘grammatical’ knowledge when reading; lack of practice with texts containing a variety of cohesive features; and the tradition of teaching such features as part of the grammatical system and practising them in isolation and at single sentence level in grammar lessons. This required extensive quantitative analysis and comparison of the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices of selected British newspaper reports and short stories, identifying the cohesive devices that tend to occur more frequently in these texts so as to uncover which difficulties (about grammatical and lexical cohesion) certain foreign learners might face. The research findings support the view that insights from discourse analysis can help teachers refine their decision-making processes of text selection and the teaching of grammar, vocabulary, reading and writing skills thereby improving students’ comprehension, and so contributes to our wider understanding of language learning.