The focus of the article is Thematic Progression as a text and a genre forming phenomenon. Thematic Progression contributes to the cohesive development of any text, the distribution of given and new information of which needs to follow certain patterns. Thematic progression patterns deal with the set of meaningful sense groups which constitute a…

Recount text is included within the curriculum of English subjects in the Indonesian context, where students are expected to be well-informed and be able to compose a good recount text to express themselves. The current study aimed at analyzing the recount text written by an advanced (C1 level of English) student based on the concept of Systemic…

This article studies students' use of sentence variety in an ESL writing course. The study includes three sentence features: (a) sentence types, (b) sentence combining, and (c) sentence patterns. Although sentence variety is part of the curriculum, the actual use of sentence structures has not been measured so far. By understanding students' use…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

Linking adverbials are important for creating textual cohesion in both written and spoken English. While there are reference grammar books describing the usage patterns of linking adverbials and studies investigating learners' difficulties in using these cohesive devices, there is little discussion on how to effectively teach and learn them. By…

Previous research on reference tracking has revealed a tendency towards over-explicitness in second language (L2) learners. Only limited evidence exists that this trend extends to situations where the learner's first and second languages do not share a sensory-motor modality. Using a story-telling paradigm, this study examined how hearing novice…

The aim of this study is to identify cohesion in the research project abstracts of Thai EFL engineering undergraduate students and to determine the writing patterns of their abstracts. Thirty-nine abstracts (200-300 words in length) from the faculty of Engineering in three different disciplines of the International Program were compiled and…

This qualitative study investigates discourse-level patterns typically employed by a Turkish lecturer based on the syntactic patterns found in the collected data. More specifically, the study aims to reveal how different native and non-native speakers of English perceive discourse patterns used by a non-native lecturer teaching in English. The…

Many studies have found EFL/ESL learners over/under/misuse linking adverbials. Because their use is specific to genre and register (Biber et al., 1999), and news writing is a compulsory course for EFL journalism majors at many Chinese universities, this study investigates their usage patterns in news and suggests teaching material design for the…

This study investigates intergroup homogeneity within high intermediate and advanced L2 writers of English from Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish first language backgrounds. A variety of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and cohesion were used to compare texts written by L1 speakers of English to L2…

This study addresses the interrelation among coherence, substitution, and reference by non-English major Chinese students. The author collected data through student questionnaires. Participants included 30 non-English major Chinese undergraduate students. The findings of this study suggested that the similarities and differences were confirmed…

This paper first briefly reviews what Halliday and Hasan (1976) said about "(the) same." The paper then examines the understanding of this form by qualitatively analyzing 259 naturally occurring spoken tokens of "(the) same" in their discourse contexts. It focuses on the following questions with reference to the data: (1) What…

This paper analyzes the use of a special type of unspecific noun, called "shell nouns" [Hunston, S., & Francis, G. (1999). "Pattern grammar". Amsterdam: Benjamins; Schmid, H. (2000). "English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: From corpus to cognition". Berlin: Walter de Gruyter], which are frequently used as cohesive devices, in the written…

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…

To explore the concept of lexical collocation, or relationships between words, a study was conducted based on three assumptions: (1) that a text structure for a unit of discourse was analogous to that existing at the level of the sentence, (2) that such a text form could be discovered if a large enough sample of generically similar texts was…