Cohesive devices in the writing

of EFL Norwegian learners:

A corpus-based study

Learner Corpus Research Conference - Work in progress report

Monika Bader & Sarah Hoem Iversen

monika.bader@hib.no , sarah.hoem.iversen@hib.no

Cohesion

“ relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text’’ (Halliday & Hasan 1976, p. 4)

Taxonomy of cohesive devices:

Reference

Ellipsis

Conjunction

Substitution

Lexical cohesion

Cohesive ties contribute to «good» writing

Previous research

Great deal on tertiary-level/high proficiency students (e.g. Crossley & McNamarra 2012, Granger and Tyson 1996, Liu and Braine 2005, Oh 2009,

Palmer 1999, Tsareva 2010, Zhang 2000)

Comparatively little on young learners/lower-proficiency students

Young native speakers: Cox et al 1990

Young EFL learners: Schiftner and Rankin 2012 (demonstratives),

Liu and Zhang 2012 (conjunctions), Abdelreheim 2014 (grammatical cohesive devices)

Genre considerations

Previous research mostly on argumentative essays

Young learners usually produce descriptive or narrative texts

Research aims

Investigate cohesive devices used in texts written by

Norwegian school-age children

What kind of cohesive devices are used and how?

CORYL – Corpus of Young Learner Language

Newly developed at the University of Bergen

129 425 words (191 568 tokens).

Anonymized texts collected for the National Testing of English (writing),

2004-5 and 2011. Randomly selected from pupils in 7th, 10th, and 11th

grade (ages 12-16).

Descriptive and narrative texts

Texts assigned to levels on the Common European Framework (CEFR)

Corpus error-tagged, but not PoS-tagged

Searchable sub-corpora: age, gender, CEFR-grade, year

CORYL: http://clarino.uib.no/korpuskel/clarino-metadata?corpus=coryl&resource=coryl

Analysis

Taxonomy of cohesive devices (Halliday and Hasan 1976):

Reference

Substitution

Ellipsis

Conjunction

Lexical cohesion

Reference

Personal

Demonstrative

Comparative

« Reference is the relation between an element of the text and

something else by reference to which it is interpreted in the given

instance(Halliday & Hasan 1976, p. 308)

Halliday & Hasan distinguish between:

Theoretical issues – sentence boundaries

Halliday and Hasan 1976 limit their attention to cases of cohesive ties

across sentence boundaries

«cohesive ties between sentences stand out more clearly because they are

the ONLY source of texture, whereas within the sentence there are

structural relations as well.» (Halliday and Hasan 1976, p. 9)

In the writing of young learners, the concept of sentence not easily defined

They have finde the tife 12 houers later but he was in a care and the cant

caught him, so they get help from the army, they Shot at the wheel and the

care stop he was take in prison and we get John back.

(CORYL, 7th grade)

T-unit boundaries?

Minimal terminable units, or T-units: one main clause with all

subordinate clauses attached to it (Hunt 1965)

across T-unit but not across sentence boundaries

I’v met this sweet and pretty boy, he is from England.

The man eat a banana and he look at TV

Personal reference (CORYL, 7th grade)

Across T-unit Within T-unit

3rd person feminine 181 58

3rd person masculine 279 100

(In)appropriate use of cohesive devices

«In an appropriate cohesive tie, both members were clearly

referenced within the text so that an adult reader had no

trouble retrieving the meaning»

(Cox et al 1990: 56)

Example of inappropriate use:

One day I and my two friends, Mary and Adam build a cabin in

a three . And.......... " Help me " It was Sarah A big snake was

a few meters behind her She tried to run from the snake but

the snake jumped over her. Then the come a man, the man

had a gun with him. The man takes the gun and shoot the

snake. He get the snake away from Mary and called the doctor

After a few minutes the doctor came. He said everything was

okay with her

(CORYL, 7th grade)

Inappropriate use?

1) We was very scared but i tok the hammer and punched the snake in her head so it slipped and landed on the ground.

2) it was just a racoon. I quickly called mum and asked if I could keep it. I namedher star.

3) At once Mary and I got to our feet, and Mary took a burning stick from the fire. I took my knife. We were just in time! The bear jumped out from behind one ofthe trees, and waved after us with his great paws, but the fire and the burningstick frightened her, so she turned and ran back into the forest.

(CORYL, 7th grade)

Narrative strategies

Nothing was gone, But I heard som weird noices. The voices came

from down under. I saw a girl. She wasn’t som very pretty.

But then she was gone. There was nothing there only air. A few

days later evrything was normal. Mum and dad went out one

night. And the she stood there, right in front of me. She was here

again. In my house.

(“The Strange Girl”, CORYL 7th grade)

Narrative strategies

" See ya wouldn't want to be ya"! said the monster.

Yes! I got a brilliant idea. Now if i can just reach that knife.

There. Got it. I'm free now I call the police and adjust the machin

in sted of me being a monster he stay's a monster and gets

teleportet to jail.

(Coryl, 7th grade)

Demonstratives – previous research findings

EFL learners (of different age and proficiency levels) underuse

demonstratives compared to native speakers (Petch-Tyson (2000), Murphy

(2001), Oh (2009), Schiftner & Rankin (2012))

The distal demonstrative that is overused, while the proximal demonstrative

this is underused (Petch-Tyson (2000), Blagoeva (2002), Schiftner & Rankin

(2012))

Plural demonstratives these/those hardly ever used by lower secondary

students (Schiftner & Rankin (2012))

Demonstratives (CORYL, 7th grade)

this that these those

33 83 0 0

Findings seem to support the patterns uncovered in previous research studies:

Plural demonstratives not used by this age/proficiency group

The distal demonstrative that used considerably more than the proximal

demonstrative this

Overuse of that

Petch-Tyson (2000) relates it to argumentative structures and the differing

strategies in referring to propositions

Shiftner and Rankin (2012) consider this an unlikely explanation in the case of

school-age learners (propositional reference not that common in the writing of

these learners, still that is overused)

Leńko-Szymańska (2004) relates it to markedness, that considered less

marked than this and thus more susceptible to overuse

Schiftner & Rankin (2012) hypothesize that markedness and L1 influence play

a role

Overuse of that?

• Schiftner & Rankin (2012) use a subset of LOCNESS corpus as an L1 reference

corpus; the chosen subsection of the corpus contains British A-level

argumentative essays

• Texts produced by lower-grade students in the learner corpus are

descriptive/narrative, not argumentative

Could the genre shift be significant?

Distribution of demonstrative determiners and

pronouns in native corpora (Biber et al.)

CONV FICT ACAD

this-D ●●●● ●●●● ●●●●●●●●

that-D ●●●● ●●● ●●

CONV FICT ACAD

this-P ●●● ●●● ●●●●●

that-P ●●●●●●●●●●●●

●●●●●●●●

●●●●●● ●●

• In conversation and fiction the distribution of demonstrative determiners is

roughly equal, while the distal demonstrative pronoun that is by far more

common than the proximal pronoun this

• In academic prose this-P and this-D is by far more common than that-P and

that-D

• This-D and this-P is more common in academic prose than in other genres

each ● represents 500 occurrences per million wordseach ● represents 500 occurrences per million words

Demonstratives – data from CORYL (7th

grade, narrative and descriptive texts)

this that

determiner pronoun determiner pronoun

24 9 10 73

• that-P significantly more common than this-P (cf. the same pattern in the native

corpora)

• differences in the distribution of determiners not that great, and in fact this-D

more common than that-D (cf. the same pattern in the native corpora)

1. When we came home, we had a chocolate cake and pizza.

That was tasty.

2. Maybe we can go up to woodden house. That was a good idea

(CORYL, 7th grade)

Way ahead

Complete analysis of 7th grade texts

10th +11th grade texts

Comparison with native speaker corpus (young NES, narrative

texts)

Thank you!

Please send us comments / questions

Monika Bader, mbad@hib.no

Sarah Hoem Iversen, shi@hib.no

Selected referencesBiber,D., S.Johnson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan.1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman

Cox, B. et al (1990). Good and Poor Elementary Readers' Use of Cohesion in Writing. Reading Research Quarterly, 25(1): 47-65.

Crossley, S. A. and McNamarra (2012). Predicting second language writing proficiency: the roles of cohesion and linguistic sophistication.Journal of Research in Reading. 35(2): 115-135.

Granger, S. and Tyson, S. (1996). Connector usage in the English essay writing of native and non-native EFL speakers of English. In World Englishes, 15(1): 17-27.

Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Hunt, K. (1965). Grammatical structures written at three grade levels (Res. Rep. No. 3) Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers ofEnglish.

Liu, M. and Braine, G. (2005). Cohesive features in argumentative writing produced by Chinese undergraduates. System 33: 623-636.

Liu, Y. and Zhang, H. (2012). Use and Misuse of Cohesive Devices in the Writings of EFL Chinese Learners: A Corpus-based Study. In Y.Tono, Y. Kawaguchi and M. Minegishi (eds.) Developmental and Crosslinguistic Perspectives in Learner Corpus Research, Benjamins.

Oh, S. (2009). Korean College Students’ Use of English Demonstratives in Argumentative Essays. English Teaching, 64 (1): 51-78.

Palmer, J.C. (1999). Coherence and cohesion in the English language classroom: the use of lexical reiteration and pronominalisation. RELC Journal 30: 61-85.

Schiftner, B. & Rankin, T. (2012). The Use of Demonstrative Reference in English Texts by Austrian School-age Learners. Developmental and Crosslinguistic Perspectives in Learner Corpus Research, 4, 63-81.

Tsareva, A. (2010). Grammatical cohesion in argumentative essays by Norwegian and Russian learners. MA thesis, University of Oslo.URL: https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/26174

Zhang, M. (2000). Cohesive features in exploratory writing of undergraduates in two Chinese universities. RELC Journal 31: 61-93.

Schiftner and Rankin (2012)