Cohesive Devices Across Disciplines: A Contrastive Study of Academic Writing Practices by Native English and Arab Writers in Education and Medicine
الموضوعات :Raghda Naeem Khudair 1 , Sousan Sattar Boroujeni 2 , Haider Hussein Katea Khanjar 3 , Bahram Hadian 4
1 - Department of English, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran
2 - English Department, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Iran
3 - Department of English, Thi-Qar University, Nasirya, Iraq
4 - Department of English, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic AzadUniversity, Isfahan, Iran
الکلمات المفتاحية: discipline-specific cohesion, corpus analysis, Arab writers, native English writers, academic writing, education, medicine,
ملخص المقالة :
The present research studied the disciplinary use of cohesive devices across academic writing, comparing Native English Writers (NEW) with Arab Writers of English (AEW). It centers around the research articles in the fields of Medicine and Education. The researchers adopted corpus-based analysis, presented by Halliday and Hasan's framework, 1976, in the exploration of cohesive device types—grammar and lexical ones—while considering frequencies along with discourse contexts. The results indicated significant disciplinary differences in cohesive strategies use among the NEW, i.e. additive conjunctions, which appear in the educational writing and facilitate argument development and logical flow between ideas (e.g., and, further); the collocations in medical writing reflect the exactitude of the subject and clarity to be expected in any sort of scientific discourse, no less with causal conjunctions. AEW also exhibited discipline-specific patterns, but their cohesive strategies are colored by the Arabic rhetorical traditions. AEW in education relied heavily on repetition to achieve thematic unity, which sometimes results in redundancy by the norms of English academic writing. AEW in medicine make more use of additive and causal conjunctions to achieve logical relations, although overuse sometimes led to long, unwieldy sentences. These findings have significant pedagogical implications for EAP instruction. They call for training in cohesive strategies specific to disciplines, especially for learners from an Arab background, as this helps learners adjust their writing practices in ways that will meet expectations in the English academic conventions while managing cultural influences.
Alharbi, W. (2022). Corpus linguistics and its applications in language teaching. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 13(4), 785–793.
Alyousef, H. S. (2021). Cohesion and coherence in L2 academic writing: A systemic functional perspective. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 52, 101004.
Anthony, L. (2002). AntConc: A learner and classroom friendly, multi-platform corpus analysis toolkit. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (pp. 7–13). Lancaster University.
Becher, T., & Trowler, P. R. (2001). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines (2nd ed.). Open University Press.
Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analyzing genre: Language use in professional settings. Longman.
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge University Press.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). Critical academic writing and multilingual students. University of Michigan Press.
Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric: Cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Cambridge University Press.
Connor, U. (2002). New directions in contrastive rhetoric. TESOL Quarterly, 36(4), 493–510.
Crossley, S. A., & McNamara, D. S. (2010). Cohesion, coherence, and expert evaluations of writing proficiency. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 32.
Flowerdew, L. (2015). Corpus-based research and pedagogy in EAP: Trends, challenges and opportunities. English for Specific Purposes, 39, 4–16.
Ghazala, H. (2008). Translation as problems and solutions: A textbook for university students and trainee translators (2nd ed.). Dar El-Ilm Lilmalayin.
Green, C. F. (2012). A computational approach to evaluating cohesion in native and non-native texts. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21(1), 47–62.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. Longman.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. (2014). An introduction to functional grammar (4th ed.). Routledge.
Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. University of Michigan Press.
Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. Continuum.
Hyland, K. (2006). English for academic purposes: An advanced resource book. Routledge.
Khalil, M., Alharbi, S., & Rahman, M. (2023). Cohesive devices in English medical research articles: A contrastive analysis. International Journal of English Linguistics, 13(1), 145–158.
Kaplan, R. B. (1966). Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. Language Learning, 16(1–2), 1–20.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.
Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in a global context: The politics and practices of publishing in English. Routledge.
Lillis, T., & Scott, M. (2015). Defining academic literacies research: Issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1), 5–32.
Modhish, A. S. (2012). Use of discourse markers in the composition writings of Arab EFL learners. English Language Teaching, 5(5), 56–63.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.
Taboada, M. T., & Mann, W. C. (2006). Rhetorical structure theory: Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse Studies, 8(3), 423–459.