A study of reiteration in the latest IELTS reading passages

ABSTRACT The research focuses on the types of reiteration, and the lexical and syntactical realization of reiteration in the latest IELTS reading passages.. Based on the theory of cohesi

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

QUY NHON UNIVERSITY

BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO

TRƯỜ ĐẠI HỌC QU HƠ

NGUY N NGỌC TÚ DUYÊN

H C U H TRO CÁC BÀ ĐỌC H ỂU E TS MỚ HẤT

C

M 8.22.02.01

S TS U N QUANG NGOẠN

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of the MA thesis entitled “A study of reiteration in the latest IELTS Reading Passages” The thesis contains no material published elsewhere or written by other people except where reference is made in the text of the thesis

This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other tertiary institution

Binh Dinh, 2021 Nguyễn Ngọc Tú Duyên

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr

N uy n Qu n N o n w o s v n m lp ul v us ul r r n s and constant encouragement throughout this study

I am greatly indebted to all the lecturers for their valuable teaching that has enlightened my research path

My particular thanks go to my colleagues at Le Quy Don High School and my family for their whole-hearted help and sympathy during my study

ABSTRACT

The research focuses on the types of reiteration, and the lexical and syntactical realization of reiteration in the latest IELTS reading passages Based on the theory of cohesion, 30 IELTS reading passages collected from the latest five IELTS Practice Test books were investigated in the light of Halliday and Hasan’s (2014) framework of cohesion The findings show that

in terms of reiteration, repetition is the most frequently used device in all reading texts to make the reading semantically related As a result, students will benefit greatly from such lexical cohesion in terms of grasping the meaning of the reading texts, and boosting their reading comprehension and theme-based vocabulary Hopefully, this thesis is a preliminary study for further research on applying lexical cohesion in teaching and learning reading comprehension skills, thereby providing grounds for students to find out strategies for answering various question types used in IELTS Reading Passages

TABLE OF CONTENTS

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF CONVENTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS vii

LIST OF TABLES viii

LIST OF FIGURES ix

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Aim and objectives 3

1.2.1 Aim of the study 3

1.2.2 Objectives 3

1.3 Research Questions 4

1.4 Scope of the study 4

1.5 Significance of the study 4

1.6 Definition of terms 5

1.7 Structure of the thesis 6

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 8

2.1 Review of previous relevant studies 8

2.2 Theoretical background 13

2.2.1 Reading 13

2.2.2 Discourse and cohesion in discourse 14

2.2.3 Cohesion and Coherence 18

2.2.4 Cohesive Devices 19

2.2.5 Grammatical Cohesive Devices 20

2.2.6 Lexical Cohesive Devices 23

2.2.7 Reiteration 24

2.3 Summary 27

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURE 28

3.1 Research Design 28

3.2 Data Collection 30

3.3 Data analysis 32

3.4 Steps of collecting and analyzing data 33

3.5 Validity and Reliability 33

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 34

4.1 Types of reiteration used in IELTS Reading Passages 34

4.2 Lexical realizations of reiteration in the latest IELTS reading passages37 4.2.1 Verbs and Verb Phrases 38

4.2.2 Nouns and Noun Phrases 42

4.2.3 Adjectives and Adjective Phrases 47

4.2.4 Lexical realizations of each type of reiteration used in IELTS reading passages 51

4.3 Syntactic Realizations of Reiteration 59

4.3.1 Verbs 60

4.3.2 Nouns 60

4.3.3 Adjectives 62

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS 64

5.1 Summary of the Development of the study 64

5.2 Summary of the Findings 64

5.2.1 Summary of the types of reiteration in the chosen IELTS reading passages 65

5.2.2 Summary of lexical and syntactic realization of reiteration in the

chosen IELTS reading passages 65

5.3 Implications 67

5.4 Limitations of the Study 69

5.5 Suggestion for further Research 69

REFERENCES 72

LIST OF CONVENTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS

LIST OF TABLES

3.1 Source and topics of the IELTS reading passages 31

3.2 Framework for the analysis of reiteration types 33

4.1 Syntactic Realizations of Reiteration in the five latest

4.3 Proportion of cases of reiteration as Verbs and Verb phrases

4.4 Proportion of types of Verbs in the cases of reiteration in the

4.5 Proportion of cases of reiteration as Nouns and Noun

phrases in the latest IELTS reading passages 42

4.6 Proportion of types of Nouns in the cases of reiteration in

4.7 Proportion of cases of reiteration as Adjectives and

Adjective phrases in the latest IELTS reading passages 47

4.8 Proportion of types of Adjectives in the cases of reiteration

4.9

Percentage of repetition in the latest IELTS reading passages

classified as Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives in the latest

IELTS reading passages

52

4.10

Percentage of synonyms and near synonyms in the latest

IELTS reading passages classified as Verbs, Nouns and

Adjectives

55

4.11 Percentage of syntactic realizations of reiteration of Nouns

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter is to present all the preliminaries of the thesis It starts with the rationale, followed by the aims of the study, research questions, scope of the study, significance of the study, and definition of terms The last part deals with the structure of the study

1.1 Rationale

Together with the great importance of reading competence in academic and occupational contexts, teaching reading comprehension has been always the focus of much concern Nevertheless, after numerous years of practice in reading, it can be observed that learners of the second language still have difficulty in understanding the texts they read According to many scholars such as Cook (1989) and Nuttal (1982), this phenomenon is attributed to the failure to interpret the writer’s “cohesive signals” as intended causing readers’ inability to make sense of correctly and properly the functional value of individual sentences in regard to their relationship with other sentences and within the whole reading passage In the view of Halliday and Hasan (2014) the continuity that cohesive relations bring about is a semantic continuity Therefore, it is obvious that cohesive patterns play an important part in the processing of text by a listener or reader In addition to this, it is vital that our students be helped to identify and understand a variety of kinds of cohesive relations creating the backbones of different types of text Within the recent decades, there have been a number of studies on cohesion, coherence and EFL reading worldwide showing the indispensable role of cohesion and coherence

in facilitating and improving reading comprehension skills Chapman (1983) finds a relationship between reading ability and the ability to complete

anaphoric relation in a cloze test, and he draws a conclusion that cohesive ties are the main factor of fluent reading and reading comprehension It is argued

by Mackay (1979) and Cowan (1976) that the recognition of conjunctions and other intersentential linguistic devices makes a major contribution to the information gathering skills of second language readers As a result, during the process of teaching reading skills, it is advisable that classroom instructions on the cohesive devices of English and their function across sentences and paragraphs should be provided thoroughly Furthermore, many other researchers such as Cooper (1984), Chung (2000), Degand & Sanders (2002) have also come to the conclusion that all types of textual cohesive conjunctions facilitate and increase the skills of reading comprehension in the same way

Having widened the influence as an international language, English has increasingly developed and become more and more necessary for people wanting to take advantage of opportunities of education, business or immigration to be skillful and competent in English and to have the ability to show this competence by means of results in examinations such as IELTS (International English Language Testing System) IELTS academic readings are pieces of writing composed for academic purposes, for the study and distribution of knowledge of a particular subject or a field For decades, a large number of studies on IELTS academic reading texts have been carried out Dealing with IELTS reading tests, test takers have to use different reading sub-skills and techniques such as skimming and scanning Moreover,

it is necessary for them to use these sub-skills to answer all the questions in one hour Therefore, undoubtedly, knowing how to deal with each type of reading tasks, answer the questions and transfer their answers to the answer sheet within the time allowed, especially identifying cases of reiteration in the reading texts plays a vital role

In order to study IELTS reading successfully and effectively, test takers have to explore the texts properly In fact, to improve reading comprehension,

it is advisable that test takers pay attention to reiteration in the reading passages Hence, it is important to discover the reiteration employed in IELTS and provide test takers with some essential knowledge about syntactic features and semantic features of reiteration used for IELTS academic reading passages so that they can make effective applications in doing IELTS reading tests Apparently, doing research on reiteration in IELTS reading passages seems to be a topic of great concern for both teaching and learning English In addition, many people have done research on this field; however, they focused on grammatical cohesion (Soraya, 2012), lexical cohesion in reading comprehension (Adel & Saeide, 2013), and lexical cohesive devices in

reading texts in T ếng Anh 12 (Bui, 2011) To the best of the researcher’s

knowledge, no studies have analyzed reiteration in IELTS reading passages; hence this study is conducted to address this gap

All the above mentioned reasons encourage the author to carry out the research on the topic “A study of Reiteration in the latest IELTS Reading Passages” for my master thesis

1.2 Aim and objectives

1.2.1 Aim of the study

The study is aimed to identify and analyze types and lexical means of reiteration in IELTS Reading Passages and study the structural realization of reiteration

1.2.2 Objectives

The writer has two objectives in this research, as follows:

- To identify and analyze the types of reiteration with their frequencies

in the latest IELTS Reading Passages

- To identify and analyze the realization of reiteration in the latest IELTS Reading Passages

1.3 Research Questions

The research is conducted to address the following two research questions:

- What are the types of reiteration in the latest IELTS Reading Passages?

- How are the types of reiteration lexically and syntactically realized in the latest IELTS Reading Passages?

1.4 Scope of the study

The data for this study are confined to 30 Reading Passages of IELTS Reading Texts collected in the latest five IELTS Practice Test books published by Cambridge University Press from IELTS Cambridge 11 to IELTS Cambridge 15 to find out the types of reiteration and focus on the structural realizations of reiteration which are then analyzed and investigated based on Halliday and Hasan’s theory of cohesion

1.5 Significance of the study

This study is expected to give the dedication to the discourse in general The writer hopes that this study can broaden the reader’s knowledge about cohesion, especially the types of reiteration in the IELTS reading passages Since the reiteration implies the form of a text, understanding on it can help the readers to understand the form and the meaning of text Besides, the writer also hopes that this study can give a contribution to the Foreign Languages Department at Quy Nhon University and students who are majoring in English Language Additionally, the study is conducted with the hope to help English language learners improve their reading skills Also, for those who want to demonstrate their English competence by means of IELTS result, insights from this study could help them to be well-prepared for the reading

module, thereby increasing their chances of success in actual IELTS Tests

1.6 Definition of terms

IELTS stands for International English Language Testing System It is

the world’s leading English language proficiency test An IELTS test is designed to assess learners’ ability in English in all four skills including Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing

IELTS Reading Passage is an academic article on a branch of academic

science written by specialists and published in a book or a journal

Following is the structure of an IELTS the major Reading Test:

Table 1.1: Structure of an IELTS Reading Test

Sources Texts are taken from books, journals, magazines and

newspapers, and have been written for a non-specialist audience All the topics are of general interest They deal with issues which are interesting, recognisably appropriate and accessible to test takers entering undergraduate or postgraduate courses or seeking professional registration The passages may be written in a variety of styles, for example narrative, descriptive or discursive/argumentative

At least one text contains detailed logical argument Texts may contain non-verbal materials such as diagrams, graphs

or illustrations If texts contain technical terms a simple glossary is provided

Answering

Test takers are required to transfer their answers to an answer sheet during the time allowed for the test No extra time is allowed for transfer Care should be taken when writing answers on the answer sheet as poor spelling and grammar are penalised

Marks Each question is worth 1 mark

(https://www.ielts.org/for-test-takers/test-format)

1.7 Structure of the thesis

This research consists of five chapters

Chapter 1, Introduction, includes the rationale, the aim and objectives, the

research questions, the scope of the study and structure of the thesis

Chapter 2, Literature Review and Theoretical Background, presents a

review of prior studies and concepts related to the problem studied In addition, we focus on the theoretical background of coherence and cohesion,

cohesive devices, grammatical cohesive devices, lexical cohesive devices and reiteration Significantly, the theoretical background on which our thesis is based on is mentioned in this part of the thesis

Chapter 3, Research Methodology, gives a description of the methods and

procedures for carrying out the study In this part, the research design, methods of study, procedures, sampling, data collection, data analysis, reliability and validity are all presented

Chapter 4, Findings and Discussion, presents the results and discusses the

findings of the study It is concerned with the work of an investigation of types of reiteration applied in the latest IELTS reading passages

Chapter 5, Conclusion and Implications, encloses the work with the

summary of the main findings leading to conclusions, discussing the limitations of the study and giving suggestions for further research accompanied with some implications in using reiteration for teaching and learning reading comprehension skills in IELTS tests based on the result of

the research

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL

BACKGROUND

This chapter starts with a review of previous, relevant studies It is followed by a brief introduction of reiteration theory covering the definition and classification of reiteration The knowledge of coherence and cohesion, cohesive devices, grammatical cohesive devices, lexical cohesive devices and reiteration is also discussed in details before the chapter ends up with a presentation of the theoretical background on which our thesis is based on

2.1 Review of previous relevant studies

Up to now, there have been numerous researches into the important role of cohesive devices in general and reiteration in particular in reading comprehension skills

Mackay (1979) and Cowan (1976) similarly argued that the recognition

of conjunctions and other intersentential linguistic devices was crucial to the information gathering skills of second language readers As a result, the teaching of reading should include classroom instruction on the cohesive devices of English, and their function across sentences and paragraphs Many other researchers such as Cooper (1984), Chung (2000), Degand & Sanders (2002) also came to the conclusion that all types of textual cohesive conjunctions facilitated reading comprehension in the same way

Chapman (1983) found a relationship between reading ability and the ability to complete anaphoric relation in a cloze test, and he concluded that the masters of such textual features – including cohesive ties was a central factor in fluent reading and reading comprehension

The writer provided another research to be compared with this research

Mojica (2006, p 105) in her journal entitles “Reiteration in ESL Academic Papers’ Do They Contribute to Lexical Cohesiveness? “She found that Repetition was the most frequently used type of lexical cohesion by both groups sampled The students also frequently employed related words like situational synonyms, situational antonyms, lexical items with superordinate/hyponym relationship, and text-structuring words A total of 60% of repeated lexical items had an identical type of occurrence Holistic scores revealed more than 50% of the student papers obtained an average rating in overall lexical cohesion

Another research focusing on another type of cohesion which was grammatical cohesion was conducted by Soraya in 2012 The research aimed

at investigating the importance of teaching grammatical cohesive devices to foreign language university learners The assessment was determined by a two-part test taken by first-year university groups They were assigned to an experimental group and a control one The students in the experimental group were taught the major connective ties whereas the control group ones were not At the end of the study period, both two groups underwent the same tests The results showed that the experimental group could perform better when answering the two tests: the cloze procedure and text comprehension test whereas the control group failed

Adel and Saeide (2013) conducted a study with the aim of determining

if making students aware of lexical cohesion devices in a text could better their reading ability In this study, 30 male EFL learners aged between 17 and

30 were chosen out of 180 intermediate students at Iran Language Institute The selection was carried out on the basis of their final scores on the reading section of Intermediate 2 and all of them were Intermediate 3 students at the time of this study performed The researchers randomly assigned them to two

control and experimental groups with 15 students in each group 10 passages were taught during the term to both groups with the same method predetermined at the Institute Nevertheless, in the experimental group, they were also given various examples for lexical devices and were asked to identify them in the texts via oral questions and group work At the end of the term, a T-test was taken to compare the mean scores of subjects in both groups The results showed a significant improvement in the reading scores in the experimental group The study mainly focused on the positive effects of the instructions on reiteration in reading comprehension

Armaya (2013) did a research about reiteration and collocation in Suzanne Collins’s Catching Fire by using discourse analysis The objectives

of this research were to find out and describe types of reiteration in Suzanne Collins’s Catching Fire by using Halliday and Hasan’s theory about cohesion and meaning of expression containing reiteration and collocation This research used descriptive qualitative method in analyzing the kinds of reiteration and collocation In this research, the instrument used by the writer was note taking From this instrument, the writer read the text of novel, and then the writer identified data that included the kinds of reiteration and collocation; the last classified the data on the note cards In this thesis the writer found out there were thirty five expressions that contain the kinds of reiteration and collocation They were thirteen expressions containing repetition, seven expressions containing synonym or near synonym, four expressions containing superordinate, three expressions containing general word, and eight expressions containing collocation The result of this research showed that lexical cohesion which consisted of reiteration and collocation that was used in Suzanne Collins’s Catching Fire had different kinds and each kinds of reiteration and collocation had different meaning By using

reiteration and collocation, the text had the relation with each other and the words were not monotonous to read

On the basis of the taxonomy of cohesive devices developed by Halliday and Hasan (2014), the paper written by Le (2014) aimed to deal with cohesive device errors in argumentative essays written by second-year English major students at the Academy of Finance More specifically, the study aimed to discover types of cohesive errors committed in those essays, the dominant cohesive errors and possible causes of these errors in 75 essays written by second-year English majors of the English department at the Academy of Finance in the academic year of 2012/2013 The data were collected through the writing task which required participants to compose approximately 250-word argumentative essays Then, cohesion errors were identified and analyzed based on the taxonomy From the findings of the study, it could be seen that a total of 409 errors were identified in those essays including errors on the use of reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion From the percentage of errors in the use of reference 64.6%, conjunction 18.1%, and lexical cohesion 17.3%, reference was obviously the most common error, followed by conjunction and lexical cohesion respectively This study also indicated probable sources of cohesive errors It was found that errors in the use of demonstratives, comparative, personal pronouns, and adversative conjunction were among the inter-lingual causes of errors Furthermore, the errors in the use of causal, additive, temporal conjunction and reiteration appeared because of the inter-lingual causes of errors The errors in the use of collocations were attributed to both inter- and intra-lingual causes From the research outcomes, the researcher drew some pedagogical implications for both learners and teachers as well as recommendations for further studies on error analysis

Bo (2018) carried out an action research examining the effectiveness of

an explicit cohesive device training procedure on improving foreign language learners’ reading comprehension The research was carried out in a six-week experimental teaching process for a class of 24 non-English majored students with the aid of two main data collection instruments, including two reading comprehension tests (a pre-test and a post-test) and a survey questionnaire The data were mainly analyzed quantitatively using the Paired Sample T-tests The overall result revealed that there was a significant improvement on students’ reading comprehension, which indicated that the technique worked well and was found effective in the study

Nguyen and Dong (2021) conducted a study on a preliminary study on

lexical cohesive devices in reading texts in the textbook Tiếng Anh10

published by Vietnam education publishing house This study employed a documentary method of analysis to answer the research question In particular, Halliday and Hasan’s framework of cohesion in discourse (2014) was adopted to investigate ten reading texts in the reading section The findings showed that in terms of reiteration, repetition was the most frequently used device in all reading texts to make the reading semantically related, while collocation cohesion produced cohesive effects among words and phrases in the same collocational environment As a result, students benefited greatly from such lexical cohesion in terms of grasping the meaning

of the reading texts, and boosting their reading comprehension and based vocabulary Hopefully, this article was a preliminary study for further research on applying lexical cohesion in teaching and learning reading comprehension or writing skills

theme-The similarity of this thesis with previous findings above was about the types of reiteration The significant differences were that the writer used

Halliday and Hasan’s theory on cohesion and wanted to describe the types of reiteration in the latest IELTS reading passages

In summary, the study of reiteration gains a lot of achievements and contributes a lot to the development of linguistics and second language acquisition However, in order to apply these achievements in teaching English for Vietnamese students, there must be more practical studies corresponding to the present situation in Vietnam Depending on the successful results of the previous researches on reiteration, this thesis is expected to contribute a small part to the application of reiteration to the improvement students’ English reading comprehension skills Moreover, some recommendations are offered for the usage of reiteration in teaching and learning English reading comprehension skills

2.2 Theoretical background

2.2.1 Reading

There are a variety of different definitions of reading Among them, according to Koda (2005, p 4), reading is the procedure of extracting and connecting countless information from the reading text and prior knowledge; whereas, Smith (2004, p 27) considers reading as a process of special thinking in which thought is prompted by a written text, including literal, evaluative and inferential comprehension

With regard to reading skills, Clark and Rumbol (2006) note that they refer to the ability to comprehend a written text When students have an ability to understand a piece of written text and combine their understanding with prior knowledge, they are able to perform the following reading comprehension skills, namely literal comprehension, evaluative comprehension and inferential comprehension To master these skills, knowing strategies is of great importance Duffy (2009) identifies strategy as

a plan to follow and adjust if necessary In the context of reading, a number of strategies including predicting, inferring, summarizing, scanning and skimming leads to successful reading

2.2.2 Discourse and cohesion in discourse

It is an indisputable fact that discourse has been increasingly popular in the academic and non-academic fields The term “discourse”, far and wide, has been defined in various ways Firstly, according to Crystal (1992, p 25), discourse is “a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit” Secondly, Halliday and Hasan (1989, p 38) states that discourse is simply defined as “language that is functional” As can

be seen from these extracts, discourse can be defined by means of meaning, and coherence is regarded as an element which cannot be replaced to form the whole meaning In addition to this, discourse is often described as “language-in-use”; therefore it refers to the interpretation of the communicative event in context From these definitions of discourse, it is understandable that discourse analysis is defined as “the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used" (McCarthy, 1991)

Halliday& Hasan (2014, p 1) propose that “the word TEXT is used in

linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole” and “A text is best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit:

a unit not of form but of meaning Thus it is related to a clause or sentence not by size but by REALIZATION, the coding of one symbolic system in another A text does not CONSIST OF sentences, it is REALIZED BY, or encoded in sentences.”

Therefore, Text is understood as a system in which sentences are

constituents, and this system has some structures that identify the position of

sentences and their relationship in the whole text IELTS Reading Passage is an

academic article on a branch of academic science written by specialists and published in a book or a journal According to Halliday& Hasan (2014),

“cohesion is a semantic relation between an element in a text and some other

element that is crucial to the interpretation of it‖ Thus, lexical cohesive devices

are linguistic means that contribute to the semantic relation between an element

in a text and some other elements crucial to the interpretation of the text

According to Halliday and Hasan (2014, p 4), cohesion is considered

to be a semantic one pointing out the relations of meaning existing within a text Cohesion, along with coherence, plays an important part in defining a text In the discourse, if the interpretation of certain elements depends on that

of others, cohesion occurs, and then the relation of cohesion is established In other words, one item presupposes the other Take the following text as a telling example:

―S m n‘t om to t p rty H m b k om to v s t r

r n mot r‖

The interpretation of the item “He” completely depends on the lexical item “Sam” Therefore, the text is considered cohesive as readers cannot understand who “he” is if “Sam” does not exist in the text

Halliday and Hasan (2014, p 13) notes that cohesive devices are regarded as elements having the "property of signaling that the interpretation

of the passage in question depends on something else” In much other research, the term can be replaced by other names such as “cohesive ties”,

“cohesive connectors”, “cohesive markers”; however, the function and meaning remain the same

Halliday and Hasan (2014, p 6) state that cohesion is expressed partly through grammar and partly through vocabulary Hence, it consists of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion

According to Hasan and Halliday (2014), lexical cohesion is one of the main types of cohesion Unlike grammatical cohesion, namely reference, ellipsis, substitution, and conjunctive cohesion, lexical cohesion is not related

to any syntactic classes of elements Lexical cohesion occurs when words in discourse are semantically related in some way Lexical cohesion includes two main types, namely reiteration and collocation

Moreover, Halliday and Hasan (2014) explains that reiteration is “the repetition of a lexical item, or the occurrence of a synonym of some kind, in the context of reference; that is, where the two occurrences have the same referent” Reiteration is divided into four types including repetition, synonyms or near synonyms, superordinate and general words

Reiteration

Repetition is the restatement of the same lexical item This is illustrated

by the following example

―As r sult o t s pro ss r nt n r y rom t sun s stor s

chemical energy In turn, the chemical energy is used to decompose carbon

ox n w t r ‖ (Pamela, 2004, p 273)

“Chemical energy” is entirely repeated in this example However, it is

claimed that reiterated items need not to be in the exactly same morphological shape to be recognized as repeated Take the following as an example

In turn, the chemical energy is used to decompose carbon dioxide and water The products of their decomposition are recombined into a new

compound, which successively builds up into the more and more complex substances that comprise the plant (Pamela, 2004, p 273)

“Decompose” and “decomposition” are all the same item, and

occurrence of any one constitutes a repetition of any of the other Inflectional and derivational variants are also considered repeated

Synonym is used to refer to items of similar meaning This is created

by the selection of a lexical item which is in some way synonymous with the proceeding one Synonymous items can be total or partial This is demonstrated in the sentences below

―A j zz b n commonly includes four to twelve musicians with a relatively large proportion of the group in the rhythm section Customarily,

t r r rumm r b ss pl y r n p n st ‖ (Pamela, 2004, p 232)

The shade of meaning of the two items “commonly” and “customarily”

is relatively similar, which can be considered partial synonym

Superordinate is defined as any item whose meaning includes that of

the earlier one (Halliday & Hasan, 2014, p 280) There is a close relationship between superordinate and so-called hyponym which refers to items of general-specific or an example of relationship (Paltridge, 2012, p 119) As it can be seen in the following sentences:

―In M y 1966 t Worl H lt Or n z t on (WHO) n n y o the United Nations, was authorized to initiate a global campaign to eradicate

smallpox The goal was to eliminate the disease n on ‖ (Pamela,

2004, p 414)

In the extracted sentence above, “disease”, which is a more general term, is a superordinate of “smallpox”

General words, which correspond to the major classes of lexical items,

are commonly used with cohesive force They possibly belong to lexical items and substitutes According to Halliday and Hasan (2014, p 280), there are

some common general words such as thing, person, make, do, stuff, ideas and

so forth David (1993, p 29) gives an example to clarify this point

A: Did you try the steamed buns?

B: Y s I n‘t l k t things much

The general word “things” is used to refer to the presupposed item itself “steamed buns‖

2.2.3 Cohesion and Coherence

According to Halliday and Hasan (2014), cohesion is a network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations connecting various parts of a text It

is considered to be the range of possibilities that exist for linking one sentence and among other things with the other that has gone before or previously mentioned Cohesion could be expressed partly through the grammar and partly through the vocabulary Hence, cohesion could refer to grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion Halliday & Matthiessen (2004, p 523) provide

a more comprehensive elaboration of cohesion; that is: “set of grammatical systems that have evolved specifically as resources for making it possible to transcend the boundaries of the clause - that is the domain of the highest-ranking grammatical unit.”

lexico-On the contrary, coherence is mentioned as the semantic relations underlining texts Van Dijk (1979, p 93) writes: “Coherence is a semantic property of discourse formed through the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences, with “interpretation” implying interaction between the text and the reader.” With this definition of Van Dijk (1979), coherence is highly related with the interpretation of the text However, the text here is limited to written texts, not referring to spoken ones It can be concluded that a text has cohesion, or is cohesive if there is a combination between its elements and explicit linguistic marking of meaning relation while a text has texture, or is coherent, if it makes sense In other words, it builds up mental creation of meaning relations during text processing

2.2.4 Cohesive Devices

In this research, cohesive devices are defined as single words or phrases that basically make the text connected In communication, cohesive devices are essential as they have a role to play in helping and stimulating the speakers and/or the listeners to understand the relationship between different sentences or between various parts of speech

In this study, the framework proposed by Halliday and Hasan (2014) is adopted because it is by far the most common in the field of text linguistics Cohesive devices are categorized into two types: grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices

The grammatical and lexical links are indicated through a system of cohesive devices However, there are certain differences in the categories of cohesive devices Oshima & Hogue (2006) shows four ways to achieve coherence including repeating key nouns, using consistent pronouns, using transitional signals and arranging ideas logically However, this is quite meager classification as it excludes a number of means to link ideas in a written text like synonyms and ellipsis In the light of Halliday & Hasan (2014), cohesive devices are distinguished into five types: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion The first four types are grammatical devices, and the last is lexical ones Lexical cohesion devices are divided into reiteration and collocation The former type, reiteration, is further separated into full and partial repetitions Full repetition means two lexical items are the same in both form and meaning while partial repetition involves two lexical items which have different forms but include certain similar semantic features Meanwhile, the latter type, collocation, refers to the co-occurrence of lexical items This is a thorough classification of cohesive devices which is applied as the theoretical background of the study

A number of studies have demonstrated the importance of understanding cohesion and cohesive devices in reading comprehension Connor (1984) asserts that the proper application of cohesive devices gives readers an opportunity to capture the connectedness between what precedes and what follows This means the dependency of the linguistic elements on one another in a text constructs a semantic unit In other words, connectedness plays an essential part in any written discourse In fact, according to Brown & Yule (1983), the 4 roles of cohesions in assisting reading comprehension including:

1 Cohesion provides the main thread of a text by showing that some entity or circumstance, some relevant feature or argument persists from one moment to another in the semantic process as meanings unfold

2 Cohesion creates the characteristic “feel” of a text The continuity expressed by cohesion not only makes a text interpretable, but also provides it with its affective power

3 Cohesion enables readers to supply all the missing items necessary for the interpretation of a text

4 Cohesion provides the basis for making predictions and building expectation

Muto (2007), in his study named “The Use of Lexical Cohesion in Reading and Writing”, proposes the remarkable influence that the knowledge

of lexical cohesion has on readers’ understanding of the story The necessary information, which authors hint at in the text, could be exposed by paying attention to the cohesive ties among words

2.2.5 Grammatical Cohesive Devices

According to Halliday and Hasan (2014), grammatical cohesion refers

to the employment of grammatical means in order to establish relations within

a discourse It is categorized into four types, namely reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction Reference is systems which introduce and track the identity of participants through text It is related to textual meaning and thus

to mode (Gerot and Wignell, 1994, p 170) Furthermore, Halliday and Hasan (2014, p.10) differentiate the reference into two parts; they are exophoric reference Which indicates situation reference, it means the source of addition information in the context of situation is outside the text As an example: When the teacher asks one of the students “stand at the door” The door in this sentence is an example of exophoric reference Exophoric contribute to the creation of text, in that it links the language with the context of situation While exophoric reference refers to something outside the text, endophoria, the other type is known as textual reference in which the interpretation of an element in a text is by referring to a thing as identified in the surrounding text, reference signals something in the text means of that is endophoric reference

is cohesive Endophoria reference is divided into two parts; they are anaphoric (to preceding text) and cataphoric (to following text) reference Endophoric is when the interpretation of reference lies within the text As an example: The man is living alone His wife left him for 9 years In this sentence “his” and

“him” is anaphoric which refers to “the man” And cataphoric is the unit refers to another unit that is introduced later on in the text

As an example: “H ‘s sup rst r ‘s t b st n s r L t‘s

w l om … Just n B b r!” In this sentence, he is cataphoric to the

presupposed subject “Justin Bieber” Substitution is the replacement of one item by another The reader or the listener can fill in the correct element based

on the preceding There are three types of substitution including nominal, verb, and clausal substitution

As an example for nominal substitution ―T r r som n w t nn s

balls in the bag These ones v lost t r boun ‖ The italic underlined

word in the second sentence above, that is “ones”, is the substitution of tennis

balls in the preceding sentence And so, the word one in the second sentence

illustrates cohesion based on substitution

For verbal substitution “You think john already knows? I think

everybody does” The word “does” in the sentence above is the substitution of

“knows” in the preceding sentence

For clausal substitution “It is going to rain? I think so” The word “so”

in the sentence above, is the substitution of “going to rain” in the preceding

sentence

Ellipsis is the omission of a word or part of sentence is closely related

to substitution Ellipsis can be described as substitution by zero Like substitution, there are also three types of ellipsis; they are nominal, verbal and clausal ellipsis In nominal ellipsis, the noun is omitted In verbal ellipsis, the verb is omitted, while in clausal ellipsis, the clause is omitted As an example

for nominal ellipsis “they do not like it, yet (they) said nothing” For verbal ellipsis “have you been swimming? – Yes, I have (been swimming)” For clausal ellipsis “I hear Smith is having an operation? – He has

Conjunction refers to a specification of the way in which what is to follow is systematically connected to what has gone before Conjunction is usually structure a text/discourse in a precise way bring the presented elements into a logical order There are four different types of conjunction, they are: temporality, causality, addition and adversity (Nunan, 1993, p 26-27) Group the words of addictive conjunctions are “and”, “or”,

“furthermore”, “similarly”, “in addition”

To exemplify “For the whole day he climbed up the steep

mountainside, almost without stopping and in all this time he met no one”

Adversative conjunctions link the presupposing clause that is contrary to the expectation set by the presupposed clause Words of adversative conjunctions

are ―but‖ ― ow v r‖ ―on t ot r n ‖ ―n v rt l ss‖ Causal conjunction expresses ―r sult r son purpos s‖ and is signaled by “so,

consequently, for this reason, it follows from this” As in: “I think I never met

m b or so I n‘t r pl y or s ll”

The last type of conjunction is temporality; it links the things by signaling sequence or time The times of temporal conjunctions are only

―t n‖ ― t r t t‖ ― n our l t r‖ ― n lly‖ ― t l st‖ in “First you need

to select fresh lemons Next, you cut them in two parts and squeeze them Add some sugar to the lemon water Finally, you can add some ice in it” in

Halliday and Hasan (2014, p 230)

Lexical cohesion occurs when two words in a text are semantically related in some way; they are related in terms of their meaning (Nunan, 1993,

p 28) Lexical cohesion embraces two different aspects, which are related each other In this research the writer just focuses on reiteration Therefore,

the writer discusses in details about this aspect

2.2.6 Lexical Cohesive Devices

Morris et al (2003) state that ―l x l o s on o urs w n r l t

word pairs join together to form larger groups of related words that can

xt n r ly ov r s nt n boun r s ‖ These assist in providing the

continuity of lexical meaning in a text Lexical cohesion is a type of cohesion whereby certain lexical features of the text connect sentences with each other

in the text

According to Halliday and Hasan (2014), lexical cohesion is “phobic” relation which is established through the structure of vocabulary Lexical cohesion occurs when two words in a text are related in terms of their

meaning Reiteration and collocation are the two major types of lexical cohesion

2.2.7 Reiteration

a Definition

Reiteration represents the repetition of a lexical item, or the occurrence

of a synonym of some kind in the context of reference; this is why reiteration

is considered to be a type of lexical cohesion which is formed of a lexical item at one end of the scale, a repeated word at the other end of the scale and

a synonym in between

According to Halliday and Hasan (2014), a repeated word may be a repetition, a synonym, a near-synonym, a superordinate or a general word In most cases the reiterated item is preceded by a reference item, generally the

definite article the Let us consider the following examples:

(1) The little boy is running down the stairs

(1a) T l ttl boy s o n to ll o sn‘t slow own

(1b) T to l r s o n to ll o sn‘t slow own

(1c) T l s o n to ll o sn‘t slow own

(1d) That um n b n s o n to ll o sn‘t slow down

In (1a) the noun the little boy is repeated; in (1b) the reiteration takes the form of a synonym, the toddler; in (1c) it takes the form of a superordinate, the child, and in (1d) it has a general referent, the human being

The referent in this case is [+human], and the choice of vocabulary depends

on the speaker’s attitude

Let us analyse some examples in which the referent is [-human]

(2) The little child wanted that book with pictures

(2a) That book of pictures is expensive

(2b) That book is expensive

(2c) That thing is expensive

In (2a) the noun that book of pictures is repeated; in (2b) the reiteration takes the form of a superordinate, that book, and in (2c) it has the general referent, that thing

b Classification of Reiteration

As we have said before, Halliday and Hasan (2014) divide lexical cohesion into two: reiteration and collocation Reiteration includes repetition (the same word), synonymy and near synonym, superordinate or a general word

― T r w s l r mus room row n n r r bout t s m height as herself; and, when she had looked under it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it

She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mus room …

b A or n ly … I took l v n turn to t s nt o t p k T

l mb s p r tly sy …

c Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,

An l p n own t r s l tly plun ‘

Among the bulrush beds, and lut ‘ t swor

An l tly w l‘ n t r w t T r t br n

M l t‘n n s n t splendor o t moon …

Henry’s bought himself a new Jaguar He practically lives in the car.”

In (a), there is repetition: mushroom refers back to mushroom In (b)

climb refers back to ascent, of which it is a synonym In (c) brand refers back

to sword, of which it is a near synonym In (d), car refers back to Jaguar; and

car is a superordinate of Jaguar – that is, a name for a more general class (as

vehicle is a superordinate of car, spoon of teaspoon, cut of pare, and so on) All these instances have in common the fact that one lexical item refers back

to another, to which it is related by having a common referent We shall refer

to this general phenomenon as reiteration A reiterated item may be a repetition, a synonym or near-synonym, a superordinate, or a general word

Repetition is the restatement of the same lexical item This is

demonstrated by the following example As a result of this process, ―r nt

energy from the sun is stored as chemical energy In turn, the chemical

energy s us to ompos rbon ox n w t r ‖ (Pamela, 2004, p 273) “Chemical energy” is entirely repeated in this example However, it is

claimed that reiterated items need not to be in the exactly same morphological

shape to be recognized as repeated Take the following as an example ―In

turn, the chemical energy is used to decompose carbon dioxide and water The products of their decomposition are recombined into a new compound,

which successively builds up into the more and more complex substances that

ompr s t pl nt ‖ (Pamela, 2004, p 273) “Decompose” and

“decomposition” are all the same item, and occurrence of any one constitutes

a repetition of any of the others Inflectional and derivational variants are also considered repeated

Synonym is used to refer to items of similar meaning This is created by

the selection of a lexical item which is in some way synonymous with the proceeding one Synonymous items can be total or partial This is illustrated in

the sentences below ―A j zz b n ommonly n lu s our to tw lv mus ns

with a relatively large proportion of the group in the rhythm section Custom r ly t r r rumm r b ss pl y r n p n st ‖ (Pamela, 2004,

p 232) The shade of meaning of the two items “commonly” and “customarily”

is relatively similar, which can be considered partial synonym

Superordinate refers to any item whose meaning includes that of the

earlier one (Halliday & Hasan, 2014, p 280) There is a close tie between

superordinate and so-called hyponym which refers to items of specific or an example of relationship (Paltridge, 2012, p 119) This can be

general-seen in the following sentences: ―In M y 1966 t Worl H lt

Organization (WHO), an agency of the United Nations, was authorized to

initiate a global campaign to eradicate smallpox The goal was to eliminate the disease in on ‖ (Pamela, 2004, p 414) In the extracted sentence

above, “disease”, which is a more general term, is a superordinate of

“smallpox”

General words, which correspond to the major classes of lexical items,

are commonly used with cohesive force They possibly belong to lexical items and substitutes According to Halliday and Hasan (2014, p 280), there are some common general words such as thing, person, make, do, stuff, ideas and

so forth David (1993, p 29) gave an example to clarify this point “A: Did

you try the steamed buns? B: Y s I n‘t l k t things mu ‖ The general

word “things” is used to refer to the presupposed item itself “steamed buns”

2.3 Summary

So far, in this chapter, the author has reviewed relevant studies and

guiding theoretical aspects concerning reiteration and the types of reiteration

In the next chapter, the research methodology is discussed in detail

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURE

This chapter aims at dealing with method and procedures of the study

It consists of the presentation of the methods used in the course of the study which support each other in investigating data and finding the results It also mentions the procedures in which the problems relating to the study were gradually solved, leading to the final results In this part, how data were collected and analysed are also presented in this chapter Finally, the chapter ends up with the confirmation of the validity and reliability of the study

3.1 Research Design

According to Stephanie (2021), quantitative research is statistical because it has numbers attached to it, like averages, percentages or quotas Quantitative research is about collecting and analyzing data to explain phenomena However, data does not always naturally happen in a numerical way The crucial elements of quantitative research design include research design, choice of data collection instrument and choice of analysis tool First

of all, quantitative research designs are either descriptive or experimental Secondly, typical methods for data collection are surveys or questionnaires with closed-ended questions, using data from another source or an experiment with a control group and an experimental group Finally, as for choice of analysis tool; for example, you might choose to report your results using confidence intervals and test statistics from t tests or f tests with significance levels (alpha levels) and p values

On the other hand, qualitative research uses non-statistical methods Qualitative research is a way to gain a deeper understanding of an event, organization or culture Depending on what type of phenomenon studied, a

broad understanding of events, data about human groups, and broad patterns behind events and people is given by qualitative research All of the different qualitative research methods have several characteristics Firstly, findings are judged by whether they make sense and are consistent with the collected data Secondly, results are validated externally by how well they might be applicable to other situations This is tough to do; rich, detailed descriptions can help to bolster external validity Moreover, data is usually collected from small, specific and non-random samples

The present study was designed to employ both the quantitative approach and qualitative approach to investigate the types and frequency of reiteration in the five latest Cambridge IELTS books thoroughly The quantitative approach was opted for to work out the quantitative aspects of the data realized in the occurrence frequency of each category of reiteration investigated, while the qualitative approach was chosen for the help in further interpretation and discussion in detail of the characteristics of each category according to Halliday and Hasan’s theory of cohesion

In detail, quantitative approach was applied to get the statistics from reiteration items in the latest IELTS reading passages Analytical and synthetic methods were also employed to draw some main features from the linguistic analysis

The process of the research is to follow several steps

First, the researcher obtained profound knowledge through referring to various resources in the field of cohesion and discourse analysis

Then, among these materials, the next task is to decide which one could

be applied to set the framework of analyzing lexical cohesive devices The choice of the research was the theoretical base in cohesion by Halliday and Hasan (2014)