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…

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…

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 study investigates the relationships between connectedness in discourse and the in-text comments that tutors write on postgraduate essays at a Thai university. Connectedness was divided into cohesion, propositional coherence and interactional coherence which were analysed using Hoey's lexical analysis [Hoey, M. (1991). "Patterns of lexis…

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…

Defines concession and suggests eight criteria which may be used when producing materials designed to practice the use of connectives such as "although" to express concession in English. These criteria include materials, which reflect typically unexpected consequences and a culturally familiar world, and practice, which goes beyond the…

It is proposed that the target for teaching pronunciation in English as a Second Language must be the authentic, connected speech that is used by most native speakers, not an artificial and over-correct model too closely tied to the writing system, a different modality entirely. In English, this means learning the language's rhythmic patterns to…

This account of the intonation of English is part of ongoing research at the University of Birmingham, England. It attempts to take account of how intonation contributes to the communicative value of an act of speech. An introductory chapter provides a short discussion of some crucial terms: pitch, loudness, stress, rhythm, and tone unit. The…

A discourse analysis of videotaped teaching demonstrations by 18 Korean and Chinese teaching assistants reveals these non-native speakers of English lack the mastery of those cues, such as prosody and topicalization, that allow native speaker/listeners to perceive intended relationships among the ideas presented. (DJD)

The teaching of discourse features which affect the relations among sentences in a paragraph has often been delayed until students are considered advanced. Yet, because control of such features is considered essential to gaining control of language segments, instruction in these features should be given from the beginning. One category of…

In a written discourse consisting of a string of "psychological paragraphs," there is in each such psychological paraqraph a "head" structure containing the topic which derives from the deep structure of the discourse. That "head" assertion differs from all other assertions in the psychological paragraph in that it carries new information. The…