Coherence Analysis of Iranian M.A. Students’ Comprehension and Production of English Relative Clauses
محورهای موضوعی : نشریه زبان و ترجمه
Masoomeh Benshams
1
(Department of English Language, Shiraz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran)
Firooz Sadighi
2
(Department of English Language, Shiraz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran)
Mohammad Falahati Qadimi Fumani
3
(Department of Computational Linguistics, Regional Information Center for Science and Technology (RICeST), Shiraz, Iran)
Naser Rashidi
4
(Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran)
کلید واژه: Discourse, production, coherence, comprehension, English relative clauses,
چکیده مقاله :
This study investigated whether English relative clauses play a significant role in textual cohesion, which is understood as textual connectivity and determination of sex and academic years in the perception and production of relative clauses of the Iranian EFL students. Therefore, 200 Iranian EFL language students (112 females and 88 males) majoring in English as a foreign language from Marvdasht and Shiraz Islamic Azad universities took two researcher-made tests, namely a reading comprehension test of 20 items and a writing test. Miltsakaki’s (2003) rules for pronoun resolution were utilized to score students’ answers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 English students to cross-validate the results of the tests conducted by the researchers. The results suggested that English relative clauses have an essential role in textual cohesion, which is understood as textual connectivity. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test and Mann-Whitney Test manifested that sex and academic year did not significantly affect Iranian EFL M.A. students’ understanding and production of relative clauses. The results of this study are of critical pedagogical implications for English as Foreign Language teachers, students, and course designers.
هدف اصلی این پژوهش یافتن تاثیر جمله واره های انگلیسی بر روی انسجام متن درک مطلب و نگارش بوده است. هدف دیگر پژوهش یافتن تاثیر جنسیت و سال تحصیلی دانشجویان کارشناسی ارشد بر نمرات کلی آنها در آزمون بوده است. 200 دانشجو(112 مرد و 88 زن) به سوالات درک مطلب و نگارش جمله واره های انگلیسی پاسخ دادند. برای تصحیح کردن آزمون نگارش جمله واره های انگلیسی از الگوریتم میلتساکاکی (2003) استفاده شد. مصاحبه شبه ساختاری با 30 دانشجو صورت گرفت تا نتایج بدست آمده توسط محققان تایید گردد. نتایج یافته ها با استفاده از ابزارهای آماری همچون مجذور کای و روش آماری تست من ویتنی نشان داد که جمله واره های انگلیسی بر روی انسجام و پیوستگی متن تاثیر داشته است. اما جنسیت و سال تحصیلی روی نمرات کل دانشجویان تاثیری نداشته است. نتایج این مطالعه دارای پیامدهای مهم آموزشی برای معلمان زبان انگلیسی ، دانشجویان و طراحان دوره های آموزشی است.
Abu Shawish, J. (2015). Discoursal coherence breaks experienced by AL-Quds Open University EFL Majors. International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL), 3(8), 1-15.
Ahmed, A. H. (2010). Students’ problems with cohesion and coherence in EFL essay writing in Egypt: Different perspectives. Literacy Information and Computer Education Journal (LICEJ), 1(4), 211-221. Alroudhan, H. E. (2016). The Acquisition of English restrictive relative clauses by Arab adult EFL learners. Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 7, 1.
Archer, J. & McDonald M., (1991). Gender roles and School subjects in adolescent girls. Educational research, 33, 55 – 64.
Azar, B. S. (2002). Understanding and using English grammar (3rd edition). New York: Pearson Education.
Baldwin, B. (1993). Anaphora resolution with centering. In Workshop on Centering Theory in Naturally-Occurring Discourse, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, May 8-10.
Benshams, M., Sadighi, F., Falahati Qadimi Fumani, M. R., Rashidi, N. (2020). A probe into discourse structure of English relative clauses of Iranian EFL learners’ reading and writing performance: Centering theory in focus. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 7, 1, 1788841.https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2020.1788841.
Brennan, S. E., Walker Friedman, M., & Pollard, C. J. (1987). A centering approach to pronouns. Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (ACL), 155- 162.
Berman, L., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Relating events in narrative: Across linguistic develop-mental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Castro, C. (2004). Lexical cohesion and chain interaction: How L1 Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish writers construct meaning in L2 English. Journal Bahasa Jendela Alam, 3, 289–309.
Chang, Y. F. (2004). Second language relative clause acquisition: An examination of cross-linguistic influences. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics Portland, OR.
Cook, G. (1989). Discourse. OUP: Oxford.
Creswell, J. W. (2015). A concise introduction to mixed methods research. Sage Publication.
Dastjerdi, H., & Hayati, S., S. (2011). Quality of Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative essays: Cohesive devices in focus. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2(2), 65-76.
de Beaugrande, R., A., de & Wolfgang, D. (1981). Introduction to text linguistics. Longman, London.
De Haan, P. (1987). Relative clauses in indefinite noun phrases. English Studies, 68(2), 171-190.
de Vries, M. (2002). The syntax of relativization. Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics dissertation.
de Vries, M. (2006). The syntax of appositive relativization: On specifying coordination, false free relatives, and promotion. Linguistic Inquiry, 37. 229–270. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1162/ling.2006.37.2.229
Di Eugenio, B. (1996). The discourse functions of Italian subjects: A Centering approach. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 1996), (pp.352-357).
Di Eugenio, B. (1998). Centering in Italian. In M. A.Walker, A. K. Joshi, and E. F. Prince, (EDs.), Centering Theory in Discourse (pp. 115- 38). Oxford.
Dimitriadis, A. (1995). When pro-drop languages don’t: On overt pronominal subjects in Greek. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 2(2), (pp.45-60). Press, Oxford.
Dimitriadis, A. (1996). When pro-drop languages don’t: Overt pronominal subjects and pragmatic inference. In Proceedings of the 32nd Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Chicago, (pp. 33–47).
Dussias, P. E., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish–English L2 speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 101–116.
Egg, M., & Redeker, G. (2006). Underspecified discourse representation. In A. Benz, & P. Kühnlein (Eds.), Constraints in discourse (pp. 137-163). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Frenck-Mestre, C. (2002). An online look at sentence processing in the second language. In R. Heredia & J. Altarriba (Eds.), Bilingual sentence processing (pp. 217–236). New York: Elsevier.
Gibson, E., Desmet, T., Grodner, D., Watson, D., & Ko, K. (2005). Reading relative clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics, 16(2), 313-353.
Grodner, D., Gibson, E., & Watson, D. (2005). The influence of contextual contrast on syntactic processing: Evidence for strong-interaction in sentence comprehension. Cognition, 95,275-296.
Grosz, B. J. (1977). The representation and use of focus in dialogue understanding (Report No. 151), artificial intelligence center, SRI International.
Grosz, B., Joshi, A., & Weinstein, S. (1983). Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourse. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics. Cambridge.
Grosz, B., Joshi, A., & Weinstein, S. (1995). Centering: A framework for modeling local coherence in discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2), 203–225. http://repos itory.upenn.ed /ircs_repor ts/ 116
Grosz, B. J., & Sidner, C. L. (1986). Attentions, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12(3), 175–204. htpp:/ /nrs.harv ard.edu./ urn-3:HUL .InstRepo s:2579 648.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Hedberg, N., & Dueck, S. (1999). Cakchiquel reference and Centering Theory. Proceedings of the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (pp. 59-74). Vancouver: British Colombia University.
Hinkel, E. (2004). “Rhetorical Features of Text: Cohesion and Coherence,” Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, p.265.
Izumi, S. (2003). Processing difficulty in comprehension and production of relative clauses by learners of English as a second language. Language Learning, 53(2), 285-323.
Joshi, A., & Weinstein, S. (1981). Control of inference: Role of some aspects of discourse structure: Centering. In 7th international joint conference on artificial intelligence, pp. 385–387. Vancouver.
Lascarides, A., & Asher, N. (1993). Temporal interpretation, discourse relations, and commonsense entailment. Linguistics and Philosophy, 16(5), 437–493.
Lee, I. (1998). Enhancing ESL students’ awareness of coherence creating mechanisms in writing. TESL Canada Journal, 15 (2), 36-49.
Lee, I. (2002a). Helping students develop coherence in writing. English Teaching Forum, 40(3), 32-39.
Lee, I. (2002b). Teaching coherence to ESL students: A classroom inquiry. Journal of Second Language Writing, 11(2), 135-159.
Liu, J., & Braine, G. (2005). Cohesive features in argumentative writing produced by Chinese undergraduates. System, 33(4), 623-636.
Loock, R. (2007). Appositive relative clauses and their functions in discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(2), 336-362.
Loock, R. & O’Connor, K, M. (2013). The discourse functions of nonverbal appositives. Journal of English Linguistics, 41(4), 332-358.
Kameyama, M. (1998). Intrasentential Centering: A Case Study. In M. Walker, A. Joshi, & E. Prince (Eds.), Centering Theory in Discourse (pp. 89-114). Oxford University Press.
Kehler, A. (1993). The effect of establishing coherence in ellipsis and anaphora resolution. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-93), Columbus, Ohio, June.
Kim, H., Cho, J. M., & Seo, J. (1999). Anaphora resolution using an extended Centering algorithm in a multi-modal dialogue system. Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on the Relation of Discourse/Dialogue Structure and Reference, 21-28.
Kuno, S. (1974). The position of relative clauses and conjunctions. Linguistic Inquiry, 5, PP. 117-136.
Maes, A. (1997). Referent ontology and Centering in discourse. Journal of Semantics, 14(3), 207-235.
Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3), 243–281.
Matsumoto, K. (2003). Intonation units in Japanese conversation: Syntactic, informational, and functional structures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Maccoby, E., & Jacklin, C., (1974). The psychology of sex differences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Miltsakaki, E. (2001). Centering in Greek. In Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Thessaloniki.
Miltsakaki, E. (2002). Toward an aposynthesis of topic continuity and intrasentential anaphora. Computational Linguistics, 28(3), 319–355. https:// doi.org/10.1 162/089120102760276009
Miltsakaki, E. (2003). The syntax-discourse interface: Effects of the main-subordinate distinction on attention structure [Unpublished dissertation]. University of Pennsylvania.
Miltsakaki, E. (2005). A centering analysis of relative clauses in English and Greek. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 11(1), 183–197. http:// repository.upenn.edu/pwp/vol 11/iss 1/15
Miltsakaki, E. (2007). A rethink of the relationship between salience and anaphora resolution. In A. Branco (ed.), Proceedings of the 6th discourse anaphora and anaphor resolution colloquium, 91–96. Lago, Portugal.
Mohseni, A., & Samadian, S. (2019). Analysis of Cohesion and Coherence in Writing Performance of Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners. Issues in Language Teaching (ILT), Vol. 8, No. 2, 213-242.
Muncie, J. (2002). ‘Finding a place for grammar in EFL composition classes.’ ELT Journal 56(2), 180-186.
Murphy, R. (2000). English grammar in use. Cambridge press University.
Nunan, D. (1999). Second language teaching and learning. Boston: Heinle and Heinle Publishers.
Paltridge, B. 2006. Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.
Prasad, R., & Strube, M. (2000). Pronoun Resolution in Hindi. In Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 6. The University of Pennsylvania.
Poesio, M., Cheng, H., Henschel, R., Hitzeman, J., Kibble, R., & Stevenson, R. (2000). Specifying the parameters of centering theory: A corpus-based evaluation using text from application-oriented domains. Proceedings of the 38th annual meeting of the association for (ACL), 400–407. Computational Linguistics. Hong Kong.
Poesio, M., Stevenson, R., Di Eugenio, B., & Hitzeman, J. (2004a). Centering: A parametric theory and its instantiations. Computational Linguisti cs, 30(3), 309-363.
Poesio, M., Stevenson, R., Eugenio, B. D., & Hitzeman, J. (2004b). Centering: A parametric theory and its instantiations. Computational Linguistics, 30(3), 309-363.
Prentza, A. I. (2012). Second language acquisition of complex structures: The case of English restrictive relative clauses. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2(7), 1330-1340.
Rah, A., & Adone, D. (2010). Relative clause versus main verb ambiguity in L2 learners at different proficiency levels. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 79–109.
Renkema, J. (2004). Introduction to discourse studies. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Reinking, J. A., & Von der Osten, R. (2011). Strategies for successful writing: A rhetoric, research guide, reader, and handbook (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Prentice-Hall.
Richards, K. (2009). Interviews. In J., Heigham, & R. A., Croker (Eds.), Qualitative research in applied linguistics: A practical introduction (pp.182-199). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schachter, J. (1974). An error in error analysis. Language Learning, 24(2), 205- 214.
Schiffrin, D. (1994). Approaches to discourse. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Strube, M., & Hahn, (1999). Functional centering: Grounding referential coherence in information structure. Computational Linguistics, 25(3), 309-344.
Taboada, M. (2002). Centering and pronominal reference: In dialogue, in Spanish. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (EDILOG 2002), 177- 184.
Taboada, M. (2005). Anaphoric terms and focus of attention in English and Spanish. In C.S., Gómez González, M., Doval-Suárez, (Eds.). The dynamics of language use: functional and contrastive perspectives, (pp. 197-218). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Taboada, M., & Hadic Zabala, L. (2008). Deciding on units of analysis within centering theory. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 4(1), 63–108. https://doi.org/ 10. 1515/ CLLT. 2 0 0 8.003
Tetreault, J. R. (1999). Analysis of syntax-based pronoun resolution methods. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 602-605.
Tetreault, J., R. (2001). A corpus-based evaluation of centering and pronoun resolution. Computational Linguistics, 27(4), 507- 520.
Turan, U. (1995). Null vs. overt subjects in Turkish discourse: A centering analysis. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Velupillai, V. (2012). An introduction to linguistic typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wiesemann, L, M. (2009). The function of Spanish and English relative clauses in discourse and their segmentation in Centering Theory (Doctoral dissertation), Simon Fraser University.
Wyrick, J. (2005). Steps to writing well (9th ed.). Boston, Mass.: Thomson Wadsworth.
Yabuki-Soh, N. (2007). Teaching RCs in Japanese: Exploring alternative types of instruction and the projection effect. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29(2), 219-252.
Zhu, L. (2014). A study of syntactic transfer in relative clause learning of Chinese college English majors. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 4(3), 613-617.
