Cohesion and Coherence in the Essay Writing of Palestinian College_Students

Hebron University
Faculty of Graduate Studies
English Department

Cohesion and Coherence in the Essay Writing of Palestinian College Students

By
Bassem Abusharkh

Supervised by
Professor Ahmad Atawneh
Professor of Applied Linguistics

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics and TESOL, College of Graduate Studies
& Academic Research, Hebron University.

2012
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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the problems and difficulties of cohesion and coherence encountered by Palestinian junior college students in their argumentative writing. Participants ' level was categorized as high, intermediate, and low. In this study cohesion is evaluated following Halliday and Hasan 's (1976) cohesion theory whereas coherence is evaluated following Grice 's maxims. Oshima and Hogue 's (2006) criteria of achieving coherence were also used in the analysis.
The analysis of cohesion shows that the three groups tend to use lexical devices.
In fact, intermediate and low level students overused reiteration as a cohesive device more than the high level students. In addition, other lexical devices like substitution and ellipses were rarely used by the three levels of students. Moreover, results reveal that language transfer is a main factor that impedes cohesion and coherence especially by intermediate and low level students. The evaluation of coherence shows that high level students achieve higher scores than intermediate and low level students. Hence, the low level students violate the criteria of achieving coherence as delineated by
Grice (1976) and Oshima and Hogue (2006). Through examination of cohesion, cohesive devices do not always lead to achieve coherence. The poor quality of the low and intermediate students ' writing causes lack of persuasive, satisfaction and logical connection of ideas.

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Acknowledgment
I would like to express

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