Identifying Discourse Patterns: A Case Study with Turkish Foreign Language Learners

Abstract

 

This paper mainly focuses on identifying discourse patterns in an argumentative text by Turkish foreign language learners majoring in English Language Teaching. They were given a cohesion test in which they identified grammatical and lexical cohesive devices after an instruction of Discourse Analysis using Halliday and Hasan's (1976) classification system. The common features and errors of the participants while identifying cohesive devices were analyzed by the frequency percentages using SPSS 20.0. Besides the descriptive analysis methods (frequency, mean and standard deviation), for the comparison of quantitative data; T-tests and One-Way ANOVA were used. Results indicate that there are significant differences between the identification of some sub-categories of grammatical cohesion (ellipsis-substitution and conjunction) and lexical cohesion (superordinate-hyponym and repetition).

Keywords

• cohesive devices, discourse analysis, ellipsis, grammatical cohesion, lexical cohesion

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