Essay On Grammatical Cohesion

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This study examines grammatical cohesion in teacher trainees’ argument essay. Twenty scripts of teacher trainees’ argument essay were purposely selected from a total of hundred essays which were assessed by two inter-raters and used as data for the study. The study basically applied a qualitative method of analysis to the data. The theoretical framework that underpins the study is Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) influential theory of cohesion in English. Three major findings were made. First, teacher trainees frequently use reference and conjunctions to achieve coherence in their argument essay. Second, a good quality essay cannot be judged on the number of cohesive markers present, linguistic features such as grammatical rules of concord and …show more content…

Which grammatical cohesive markers are employed in teacher trainees’ argument essay? 2. Can the frequent use of grammatical cohesive markers determine a high quality essay and vice versa? 3. What are the least grammatical cohesive markers used in teacher trainees’ argument …show more content…

Some of the studies show interest in expository writing of students (Johnson, 1992; Zhang, 2000), others also express interest in comparing cohesive markers identified in good quality essays and poor quality ones. (Meisuo, 2000; Choic, 2005). There are quite a number of studies that have been undertaken on cohesion in undergraduate’ essays but before some of these are reviewed there are certain concepts that need to be explained. These concepts are text, cohesion, coherence and cohesive ties. A text is defined by Halliday and Hasan (1976:1) as “any passage, spoken or written of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. A text can also be a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit like a clause or a sentence and it is not defined by its size… A text is best regarded as a semantic unit: a unit not of form but of meaning.” A text is not a grammatical unit like a phrase or a clause or even a sentence. It is a supersentence. A text can even be less than one sentence in the grammatical structure. Such structures may be warnings, titles and inscriptions and advertising slogans yet they constitute a

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