Cohesive devices in the writing

of EFL Norwegian learners:

A corpus-based study

Learner Corpus Research Conference - Work in progress report

Monika Bader & Sarah Hoem Iversen
monika.bader@hib.no , sarah.hoem.iversen@hib.no
 Cohesion
relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a
text (Halliday & Hasan 1976, p. 4)

Taxonomy of cohesive devices:

Reference
Ellipsis
Conjunction
Substitution
Lexical cohesion

Cohesive ties contribute to good writing

 Previous research
Great deal on tertiary-level/high proficiency students
(e.g. Crossley & McNamarra 2012, Granger and Tyson 1996, Liu and Braine 2005, Oh 2009,
Palmer 1999, Tsareva 2010, Zhang 2000)

Comparatively little on young learners/lower-proficiency students

Young native speakers: Cox et al 1990
Young EFL learners: Schiftner and Rankin 2012 (demonstratives),
Liu and Zhang 2012 (conjunctions), Abdelreheim 2014 (grammatical cohesive devices)
Genre considerations

Previous research mostly on argumentative essays

Young learners usually produce descriptive or narrative texts
 Research aims

Investigate cohesive devices used in texts written by

Norwegian school-age children

What kind of cohesive devices are used and how?

CORYL Corpus of Young Learner Language
Newly developed at the University of Bergen
129 425 words (191 568 tokens).
Anonymized texts collected for the National Testing of English (writing),
2004-5 and 2011. Randomly selected from pupils in 7th, 10th, and 11th
grade (ages 12-16).
Descriptive and narrative texts
Texts assigned to levels on the Common European Framework (CEFR)
Corpus error-tagged, but not PoS-tagged
Searchable sub-corpora: age, gender, CEFR-grade, year

CORYL: http://clarino.uib.no/korpuskel/clarino-metadata?corpus=coryl&resource=coryl
Analysis

Taxonomy of cohesive devices (Halliday and Hasan 1976):

Reference
Substitution
Ellipsis
Conjunction
Lexical cohesion
 Reference

Reference is the relation between an element of the text and

something else by reference to which it is interpreted in the given
instance(Halliday & Hasan 1976, p. 308)

Halliday & Hasan distinguish between:

Personal

Demonstrative

Comparative
Theoretical issues sentence boundaries

Halliday and Hasan 1976 limit their attention to cases of cohesive ties
across sentence boundaries
cohesive ties between sentences stand out more clearly because they are
the ONLY source of texture, whereas within the sentence there are
structural relations as well. (Halliday and Hasan 1976, p. 9)

In the writing of young learners, the concept of sentence not easily defined

They have finde the tife 12 houers later but he was in a care and the cant
caught him, so they get help from the army, they Shot at the wheel and the
care stop he was take in prison and we get John back.

(CORYL, 7th grade)

T-unit boundaries?
Minimal terminable units, or T-units: one main clause with all
subordinate clauses attached to it (Hunt 1965)

across T-unit but not across sentence boundaries

Iv met this sweet and pretty boy, he is from England.

The man eat a banana and he look at TV
Personal reference (CORYL, 7th grade)

Across T-unit Within T-unit

3rd person feminine 181 58
3rd person masculine 279 100
(In)appropriate use of cohesive devices

In an appropriate cohesive tie, both members were clearly

referenced within the text so that an adult reader had no
trouble retrieving the meaning
(Cox et al 1990: 56)
Example of inappropriate use:

One day I and my two friends, Mary and Adam build a cabin in
a three . And.......... " Help me " It was Sarah A big snake was
a few meters behind her She tried to run from the snake but
the snake jumped over her. Then the come a man, the man
had a gun with him. The man takes the gun and shoot the
snake. He get the snake away from Mary and called the doctor
After a few minutes the doctor came. He said everything was
okay with her

(CORYL, 7th grade)

 Inappropriate use?

1) We was very scared but i tok the hammer and punched the snake in her head so
it slipped and landed on the ground.

2) it was just a racoon. I quickly called mum and asked if I could keep it. I named
her star.

3) At once Mary and I got to our feet, and Mary took a burning stick from the fire.
I took my knife. We were just in time! The bear jumped out from behind one of
the trees, and waved after us with his great paws, but the fire and the burning
stick frightened her, so she turned and ran back into the forest.

(CORYL, 7th grade)

Narrative strategies
Nothing was gone, But I heard som weird noices. The voices came
from down under. I saw a girl. She wasnt som very pretty.
But then she was gone. There was nothing there only air. A few
days later evrything was normal. Mum and dad went out one
night. And the she stood there, right in front of me. She was here
again. In my house.

(The Strange Girl, CORYL 7th grade)

Narrative strategies

" See ya wouldn't want to be ya"! said the monster.

Yes! I got a brilliant idea. Now if i can just reach that knife.
There. Got it. I'm free now I call the police and adjust the machin
in sted of me being a monster he stay's a monster and gets
teleportet to jail.

(Coryl, 7th grade)

Demonstratives previous research findings

EFL learners (of different age and proficiency levels) underuse

demonstratives compared to native speakers (Petch-Tyson (2000), Murphy
(2001), Oh (2009), Schiftner & Rankin (2012))
The distal demonstrative that is overused, while the proximal demonstrative
this is underused (Petch-Tyson (2000), Blagoeva (2002), Schiftner & Rankin
(2012))
Plural demonstratives these/those hardly ever used by lower secondary
students (Schiftner & Rankin (2012))
Demonstratives (CORYL, 7th grade)

this that these those

33 83 0 0

Findings seem to support the patterns uncovered in previous research studies:

Plural demonstratives not used by this age/proficiency group
The distal demonstrative that used considerably more than the proximal
demonstrative this
Overuse of that
Petch-Tyson (2000) relates it to argumentative structures and the differing
strategies in referring to propositions
Shiftner and Rankin (2012) consider this an unlikely explanation in the case of
school-age learners (propositional reference not that common in the writing of
these learners, still that is overused)

Leko-Szymaska (2004) relates it to markedness, that considered less

marked than this and thus more susceptible to overuse

Schiftner & Rankin (2012) hypothesize that markedness and L1 influence play
a role
Overuse of that?
Schiftner & Rankin (2012) use a subset of LOCNESS corpus as an L1 reference
corpus; the chosen subsection of the corpus contains British A-level
argumentative essays
Texts produced by lower-grade students in the learner corpus are
descriptive/narrative, not argumentative

Could the genre shift be significant?

 Distribution of demonstrative determiners and
pronouns in native corpora (Biber et al.)
CONV FICT ACAD CONV FICT ACAD
this-D this-P
that-D that-P

each represents 500 occurrences per million words
each represents 500 occurrences per million words

In conversation and fiction the distribution of demonstrative determiners is

roughly equal, while the distal demonstrative pronoun that is by far more
common than the proximal pronoun this
In academic prose this-P and this-D is by far more common than that-P and
that-D
This-D and this-P is more common in academic prose than in other genres
Demonstratives data from CORYL (7th
grade, narrative and descriptive texts)

this that
determiner pronoun determiner pronoun
24 9 10 73

that-P significantly more common than this-P (cf. the same pattern in the native
corpora)
differences in the distribution of determiners not that great, and in fact this-D
more common than that-D (cf. the same pattern in the native corpora)
1. When we came home, we had a chocolate cake and pizza.
That was tasty.
2. Maybe we can go up to woodden house. That was a good idea

(CORYL, 7th grade)

Way ahead

Complete analysis of 7th grade texts

10th +11th grade texts
Comparison with native speaker corpus (young NES, narrative
texts)
 Thank you!

Please send us comments / questions

Monika Bader, mbad@hib.no

Sarah Hoem Iversen, shi@hib.no
 Selected references
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Crossley, S. A. and McNamarra (2012). Predicting second language writing proficiency: the roles of cohesion and linguistic sophistication.
Journal of Research in Reading. 35(2): 115-135.
Granger, S. and Tyson, S. (1996). Connector usage in the English essay writing of native and non-native EFL speakers of English. In World
Englishes, 15(1): 17-27.
Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Hunt, K. (1965). Grammatical structures written at three grade levels (Res. Rep. No. 3) Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of
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RELC Journal 30: 61-85.
Schiftner, B. & Rankin, T. (2012). The Use of Demonstrative Reference in English Texts by Austrian School-age Learners. Developmental
and Crosslinguistic Perspectives in Learner Corpus Research, 4, 63-81.
Tsareva, A. (2010). Grammatical cohesion in argumentative essays by Norwegian and Russian learners. MA thesis, University of Oslo.
URL: https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/26174
Zhang, M. (2000). Cohesive features in exploratory writing of undergraduates in two Chinese universities. RELC Journal 31: 61-93.
Schiftner and Rankin (2012)