The paper titled focuses on examining how cohesive devices are utilized in the academic writing of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduate students. The study aims to investigate the impact of incorrect and repetitive use of cohesive ties on the effectiveness of academic writing, specifically analyzing the written discourse of Saudi students.
The research seeks to analyze the cohesion in the descriptive, narrative, process analysis, and argumentative essay writing of Saudi students. The methodology involved collecting data from fifteen EFL students in their second year of study at a Saudi university. The researchers examined various cohesive ties and their effect on the quality of writing, analyzing the essays in terms of grammatical cohesion-reference, substitution, ellipsis, lexical-reiteration, collocation, and lexico-grammatical cohesion-conjunction.
Key findings of the study indicate that learners made simple use of cohesive ties, with a preference for reference, particularly pronouns and reiteration. The results showed that students often ignored or underused other cohesive devices such as substitution, ellipsis, synonymy, antonymy, collocation, and conjunction. The research also found that students sometimes provided unnecessary linkers or used them excessively without proper justification in their writing.
The study concludes that the inappropriate occurrence and excessive frequency of pronouns and repetition of the same lexical items can lead to non-cohesive writing, affecting its structure and meaning. Based on these findings, the researchers offer suggestions to improve the pedagogy of writing for EFL students. This research contributes to the understanding of cohesive device usage in academic writing and provides insights for enhancing writing instruction for EFL learners.