Nghiên cứu các phương tiện liên kết từ vựng trong một số bài đọc của giáo trình tiếng Anh Quản trị kinh doanh và gợi ý cho việc giảng dạy tiếng Anh cho sinh viên năm thứ ba trường Đại học Công đoàn

Mục tiêu của luận văn là khảo sát những phương tiện liên kết từ vựng nào xuất hiện trong cuốn giáo trình tiếng Anh Quản trị Kinh doanh và xuất hiện với tần suất bao nhiêu, đưa ra một cái nhìn cận cảnh về cách dùng các phương tiện liên kết từ vựng này, từ đó có thể hỗ trợ cho việc dạy và học tiếng Anh chuyên ngành Kinh tế được hiệu quả hơn. Kết quả phân tích đã chứng minh, tất cả các loại liên kết từ vựng (liên kết lặp gồm có: từ đồng nghĩa, từ trái nghĩa, từ lặp, từ mang nghĩa bao hàm và liên kết kết hợp) đều xuất hiện trong cuốn giáo trình này trong đó từ lặp xuất hiện nhiều nhất. Kết quả nghiên cứu cũng cho thấy một số đặc điểm chung của diễn ngôn tiếng Anh Kinh tế, đó là các phương tiện liên kết từ vựng được sử dụng để tạo ra tính kết dính cao giữa các diễn ngôn làm cho diễn ngôn Kinh tế dễ hiểu hơn với người đọc. Kết quả nghiên cứu cũng đưa ra một số gợi ý cho việc dạy và học kỹ năng đọc và viết tiếng Anh chuyên ngành Kinh tế.

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale of the study

Over the past two decades, the teaching and learning English, especially English forSpecific Purposes (ESP) have changed dramatically If in the 1990's, ESP was taught insome universities in Vietnam, now it becomes a compulsory subject in almost everyuniversities and colleges that follow the curriculum established by the Ministry ofEducation and Training (MOET) The ESP course provides students with backgroundknowledge and vocabulary of specialist fields, therefore it helps them greatly in futurecareers Being aware of the major role of ESP, teachers of English at Trade UnionUniversity (TUU) have always attempted to improve the teaching and learning of ESP attheir college However, there remain some difficulties as follows:

At TUU, English is taught in totally five semesters of which three are for General English(GE) and two semesters are for ESP GE accounts for 135 credit periods and ESP is taught

in 90 credit periods In order to attend ESP course, students are required to complete GE

levels The basic English course with the main teaching and learning materials are New Headway Elementary and New Headway Pre-intermediate However, in the next stage of

learning, the ESP course book requires learners of upper-intermediate and advanced level.Therefore, after GE stage, students encounter numerous difficulties in learning in ESPcourse as they are supposedly at pre-intermediate level

English for Business Studies (EBS) is chosen as the main course book of ESP at TUU The

book was written by Ian MacKenzie and published in 2002 by Cambridge UniversityPress The book comprises of 30 units of which 8 units are chosen for ESP course level 1and another 8 units for ESP course level 2 at TUU In each unit, there are several sectionscovering all the four skills: listening, reading, writing, speaking Most of the units containthree parts:

1 An informative reading text giving an overview of a particular topic with variouscomprehension and vocabulary exercises and discussion activities

2 Either listening exercises or shorter authentic reading passage

3 An additional case study, role play, discussion activity or writing exercise.

The listening part provides authentic interviews with business people and economists whoare British and American native speakers and non-native speakers from Germany, Italy,Switzerland, India and Malaysia The listening exercises that follow are often note takingand question answering, very few tasks have multiple choice questions Therefore it issometimes difficult for TUU's students to follow Consequently, exploiting the listeningpart is unfeasible for TUU's learners For speaking task, it is not practical for a class of 60and over 60 students where the teacher's role of a conductor is vague That is, it is quitehard for teachers to cover all speaking activities Moreover, TUU's students are notcompetent and self-conscious enough to fulfill the given task themselves Therefore,learning speaking possibly turn out to private talking and disorder in class As for writing,the demands for the task are sometimes excessive for students Grammar is quite important

in text comprehension However, most grammatical structures and rules are taught in GEand students can recall them easily without the teacher's explanation

Yet, there are still complaints from our students about the difficulties they encounter whilelearning reading passages in BE On the one hand, it may derive from students'psychological reasons For most of them, this is the first time they learn ESP and an ESPreading text which is full of economic and business terms in business context may be achallenge Consequently, they are not willing to study attentively On the other hand,students find it is hard job to remember so many new terms and obtain a generalcomprehension of the text

The above reasons have induced me to conduct a research on reading part, as this part is

also a main part of every unit in EBS course book With some experience in teaching GE

and ESP for BE students, the researcher realize the crucial role of coherence and cohesion

in the text understanding and vocabulary learning of TUU's students As a result, theauthor decide to make an investigation into cohesive devices used in the texts of BE coursebook, especially lexical cohesive devices hoping that it may help students more inunderstanding the reading texts and learning vocabulary

2 Scope of the study

Within the framework of a minor M.A thesis, the study mainly focuses on lexical cohesivedevices, the frequency of occurrence of these devices in some chosen texts in BE coursebook The study points out how often these lexical cohesive devices appear and how theyaffect the text comprehending and vocabulary learning After examining and analyzing thecollected data, some pedagogical implications will be drawn for both teachers and students

of BE

3 Aims of the study

The study aims at:

 Figuring out how these lexical cohesive ties are used in BE sample texts of the

course book EBS.

 Providing BE teachers and students with an insight into the use of lexical cohesivedevices and thereby assisting their writing and reading comprehension

4 Research questions

In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the following questions are raised:

1 What lexical cohesive devices are used in BE texts?

2 What lexical cohesive devices are employed most frequently in BE texts?

3 What are the overall features of BE discourses in terms of lexical cohesion?

5 Methods of the study

The study uses description, analysis and statistics research methods to achieve the researchobjectives The data for the research analysis are collected from six sample texts chosen in

EBS course book namely: Sample text 1: Types of banks; Sample text 2: Companies; Sample text 3: Bonds; Sample text 4: Market leaders, challengers and followers; Sample text 5: Taxation; Sample text 6: The business cycle All the lexical cohesive items of each

type of lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation) and its subtypes occur in the six texts

are identified and calculated The total number of each type is then converted intopercentage to compare within a text or among the categories and according to theanalytical purposes

6 Organization of the study

This thesis includes three main parts

The INTRODUCTION part introduces the rationale, the scope, the aims, theresearch questions, the research methodology and the design of the study

The DEVELOPMENT comprises of two chapters

- Chapter 1: provides a thorough theoretical background of three main

terminologies: discourse, discourse analysis, coherence and cohesion

- Chapter 2: presents the analysis of lexical cohesive devices in some

reading texts in BE course book for the third year students at Trade Union University

The CONCLUSION shows a recapitulation of the study, implications for teaching and learning BE, limitations of the study and suggestions for further research

PART B: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This part introduces concepts of discourse, text, discourse analysis, discourse context,cohesion and coherence, cohesive devices which support this thesis

1.1 Discourse and discourse analysis

1.1.1 Discourse

Well-known linguists have shared similar viewpoint about the concept of discourse DavidNunan (1993:5) agreed that discourse is "a stretch of language consisting of severalsentences which are perceived as being related in some way" Crystal (1992:25) hadsimilar perspective of discourse when he defined discourse as "a continuous stretch of(especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such

as a sermon, argument or narrative"

More recently, discourse is defined by Nguyễn Hòa (2004) as "a combination of sentences(or utterances) used to get our message across It has its own meaning and is more than thesum of the meaning of its constituents"

1.1.2 Discourse and Text

There seem to be two different trends in linguists towards the terms "discourse" and "text".One distinguishes the two terms whereas the other does not

Cook treated the terms "discourse" and "text" as two different categories when he stated:

"discourse is a stretch of language perceived to be meaningful, unified and purposive Text

is a stretch of language interpreted formally, without context." (Cook, 1989: 156&158,cited in Nunan, 1993:6)

David Nunan used the term "text" to refer to "any written record of a communicativeevent" and "discourse" to refer to "the interpretation of the communicative event incontext" (Nunan, 1993: 6-7)

Crystal distinguished text as "a piece of naturally occurring spoken, written, or signedlanguage identified for purpose of analysis It is often a language unit with a definablecommunicative function, such as a conversation, a poster." (Crystal, 1992:72, cited in Vân,2006:14), and discourse as "a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence, oftenconstituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument or narrative" (Crystal, 1992:25,cited in Vân, 2006:14)

To some other scholars, text and discourse should refer to the same subject matter and may

be used interchangeably Halliday and Hasan implied "discourse" when defining "text":

"the word Text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whateverlength that does form a unified whole A text is a collection of related sentences, with asingle sentence as the limiting case, a semantic unit This unit is related to a clause or asentence by realization, i.e a text is realized by sentences The expression of the semanticunity of the text lies in the cohesion among the sentences of which it is composed."(Halliday & Hasan,1976:1)

Vân (2006) had seen the problem of distinguishing the two terms He argued that we really

do not need to distinguish them as "text or discourse is an instance of language in use; thismeans that no text occurs without a context , any attempt to distinguish text fromdiscourse will result in complicating the problem of terminology" Based on the definition

of Halliday and Hasan (1989), he confirmed that "discourse (or text) is a unit of meaningand functional It is functional in the sense that it occurs in a context of situation In terms

of size, a discourse may be realized by a word, a phrase, a clause or a sentence, aparagraph, a cluster of paragraphs, a book, or even the whole library of books."

For the purpose of this study, the author would like to take the viewpoint of Hoàng VănVân (2006) about text and discourse as the base Therefore, the words text and discourseare treated interchangeably

1.1.3 Spoken and written discourse

Although spoken and written discourse share some similar features; for example, they areused "to get things done, to provide information and to entertain" (Nunan, 1993:8); it isclear that spoken and written discourse are different in other features David Nunan (1993)

made distinction between spoken and written discourse based on three categories:grammar, lexical density and situation

Written discourse, linguistically, may include internally complex clauses while in spokendiscourse, clauses are linked in an "addictive fashion" In particular, while writtendiscourse may contain complete sentences with subordination, metal-lingual clausemarkers, spoken language may contain incomplete sentences - often simple sequences of

phrases - with little subordination (the most frequent case is the coordinator "and")

"Lexical density is a characteristic difference between spoken and written discourse.Written discourse displays a much higher ratio of lexical (content) words ( ) to totalrunning words" (Vân, 2006: 24) Therefore, written discourse seems to have moreinformation packed into it

According to Nunan, there is no common situation in written discourse, the situationtherefore has to be inferred from the text For better understanding of the text, "the wordsthemselves must carry all the shades of meaning" However, when readers can not signalthat they do not understand, "the writer must make assumptions about the reader's state ofknowledge If incorrect assumptions are made, then communication may be seriouslyimpaired " (Nunan, 1993: 14)

This thesis analyzes the lexical cohesion in written discourse of Business English.Therefore, only the features of written discourse will be taken into account In order toanalyze a discourse, it is worth exploiting Discourse Analysis area

1.1.4 Discourse Analysis

Brown and Yule (1983) state that "the term discourse analysis has come to be used with awide range of meanings which cover a wide range of activities at the intersection of manydisciplines from sociolinguistics, philosophical linguistics to computational linguistics"

According to Nguyễn Hòa (2000) "discourse analysis is a study of how and for whatpurposes language is used in a certain context of situation and the linguistic means to carryout these purposes" The author claims that the speakers or writers are always located atthe main "stage" of communication The speakers or writers initiate topics, set up

presuppositions, define "information structures" and make "inference" while the hearers orreaders interpret and draw inferences He comes to a conclusion that "this is essentiallywhat makes communication a two-way process by means of language"

Discourse analysis is undoubtedly the study of language in use of both written and spokenform It includes examining both form and function of the language It analyses linguisticfeatures that characterize the social and cultural factors that help in our perception andinterpretation of different texts While a discourse analysis of spoken text might focus onturn-taking, overlapping, adjacency pairs or repair, written text of this kind studies thetopic development and cohesion across sentences

Context is therefore the environment in which a discourse occurs Context refers to bothlinguistic and non-linguistic aspects Context can add more general information about thenature of the text, the period written, fiction or non-fiction, the age and nationality of thewriter Apparently, in order to make a communicative event become successful, listeners

or readers have to know the context in which the discourse occurs This helpsunderstanding the text/discourse more thoroughly The context of situation may be

captured by readers' guessing the underlied assumption or using their backgroundknowledge

In discourse analysis, context helps define reference, establish and accumulatepresuppositions, i.e not repeat the old information, talk more and more new information.Context helps hearer detect conversational implicature, because in different context, theimplicature is interpreted differently

1.1.5.2 Context of situation

The term "context of situation" was first coined by a famous British anthropologist andgifted linguist Malinowski in 1923 With this term, he meant "the total environmentincluding the verbal environment and the situation in which the text occurs" (Malinowski,

1923 quoted in Vân, 2006: 34) Context of situation, in Malinowski's sense, indicates theenvironment of the text His theory established a basis for later linguists to develop theirown models of context

Later in their book, Halliday and Hasan (1976; 22), proposed that "field, mode and tenorcollectively define the context of situation of a text" This general notion describes howthe context of situation determines the kinds of meaning that are expressed According to

the two authors, field is the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with the

purposive activity of the speaker or writer, includes the subject-matter as one element;

mode is the function of the text in the event, including both the channel taken by language

(written or spoken) and its genre, or rhetorical mode, as narrative, didactic, persuasive and

so on; tenor refers to the type of role interaction, the set of relevant social relations,

permanent and temporary, among the participants involved

Eggins (1994) shared the same viewpoint with Halliday and Hasan when he consumed that

"context of situation is usually discussed under three variables: what is talked about, whatthe relationship between the communicators is, what role the language plays" (Eggins,

1994, 30)

1.2 Cohesion and coherence

1.2.1 Cohesion

Cohesion plays a very crucial part in the comprehension of written discourses This can beexplained as comprehension is considered a process that happens within the reader, or atleast, depends on the cohesion and coherence of texts Cohesion exists within a text and isnot the same as coherence which is something that the reader establishes during the process

of reading Cohesion creates semantic continuity and therefore it permits coherence andcomprehensibility The more explicit the cohesive relations are, the easier the text is tounderstand

Tanskanen (1984) refers cohesion to "the grammatical and lexical elements on the surface

of a text which can form connections between parts of the text" (Tanskanen, 1984: 7)

Halliday & Hasan (1976) consider "the concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers torelations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text" According to

them, cohesion occurs when the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another The one presupposes the other When this happens, a

relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed,are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text

1.2.2 Coherence

Halliday & Hasan (1976) claimed "coherence is the underlying organizer which makes thewords and sentences into a unified discourse that conforms to a consistent world picture.Coherent text is meaningful, unified and gives the impression of "hanging together""

In grammar, the sentences that don't fit together in a sensible way, though there's nothingwrong with the individual sentences, are called ungrammatical In text and discourse

analysis, a text which combines such ungrammatical sentences is considered incoherent.

One of the key issues in text and discourse analysis is to find exactly what it is that makessome text hang together while other texts are incoherent

Palmer (1983b) wrote: "coherence refers to the rhetorical devices, to ways of writing andspeaking that bring about order and unity and emphasis" Coherence can obtain on thebasis of relevance, the co-operative principle, the common shared background knowledgebetween participants in a speech event, and how a discourse is structured as well.

1.2.3 Cohesion and coherence

A text is a passage of discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is coherent withrespect to the context of situation, and therefore consistent in register; and it is coherentwith respect to itself, and therefore cohesive (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) The two concepts

of discourses: cohesion and coherence are considered interrelated in such a way thatcohesion is seen as one of the ways of indicating coherence; but it would be incorrect toidentify it with coherence, and assume that there is one-to-one correspondence betweenthem (Nguyễn Hòa, 2000)

1.3 Cohesive devices

1.3.1 Cohesive devices

A text with grammatical sentences and/or has certain words and expressions which link thesentences together is considered coherent Such linking words and expressions, the use ofrepetition, are known as cohesive devices, they are like the glue which holds different parts

of a text together

Cohesive devices help us to distinguish new information from old information in a text Aseries of sentences without cohesive devices can give the impression of conveyingcompletely new information in each sentence, unrelated to old information from theprevious sentences However, we can often draw on our background knowledge or cluesfrom the context so that we can organize the information without the help of cohesivedevices Cohesive devices help us to make a text coherent, but are not necessary orsufficient to create coherence on their own It is acknowledged that a communicationdiscourse must be coherent, but not necessarily cohesive Because a text with somecohesive devices only, without any grammatical sentences can make readers or hearersconfused and therefore that text is incoherent for them On the contrary, a text is still

considered coherent when it includes grammatical sentences, though the writer or speakerdoes not use cohesive devices

Cohesive devices are only one factor in making a text coherent The important factors inmaking a text coherent are the intentions, expectations and back-ground knowledge of thetext producer (the speaker or writer) and the text receiver (the hearer or reader)

1.3.2 Classification

Cohesion is one of the text properties that contributes to the organization of discourse Theterm refers to the connectedness of the surface elements in the text The concept ofcohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, andthat define it as a text Cohesion occurs when interpretation of some element in thediscourse is dependent on that of another Cohesion is part of a system of language Thepotential for cohesion lies in the systematic resources of reference, ellipsis, and so on that

is built into the language itself Cohesion is partly expressed through the grammar andpartly through vocabulary We can refer them therefore to grammatical cohesion andlexical cohesion (Halliday and Hasan, 1976)

Halliday and Hasan (1976) identified five types of cohesion: reference cohesion,substitution cohesion, ellipsis cohesion, conjunctive cohesion, and lexical cohesion Thefirst four types fall under the category of grammatical cohesion Lexical cohesion on theother hand refers to relations between any lexical item and some previously occurringlexical item in the text, quite independently of the grammatical category of the items inquestion The five types of cohesion are explained below:

1.3.2.1 Referential Cohesion

Halliday (1994) states "a participant or circumstantial element introduced at one place inthe text can be taken as a reference point for something that follows In the simplest casethis means that the same thing comes again But it may also mean that it serves as a basisfor comparison" (Halliday, 1994: 309)

Thompson gives a very explicit explanation of reference, he wrote: "reference is the set ofgrammatical resources which allow the speaker to indicate whether something is repeated

from somewhere else in the text or whether it is has not yet appeared in the text"(Thompson, 1996: 148).

There are two main types of reference, they are anaphoric reference and cataphoricreference While cataphoric reference points the reader or listener forward, i.e it draws usfurther into the text in order to identify the elements to which the reference items refer,anaphoric reference points the reader or listener backwards to a previously mentionedentity, process or state of affairs (David Nunan, 1993) With this type of reference, thesubsequent items can only interpreted with reference to the initial phrase of the firstsentence

1.3.2.2 Substitution cohesion

According to Halliday & Hasan (1976), substitution is "the replacement of one item byanother" They explained that it is ""a relation between linguistic items, such as words orphrases , a relation on the lexico-grammatical level" (Halliday & Hasan, 1976: 89)

Substitution cohesion consists of sense identity relation instead of a reference identityrelation It also has three subdivisions such as nominal substitution, verbal substitution andclausal substitution

1.3.2.3 Elliptical cohesion

Ellipsis cohesion refers to the case of absence of a word, a phrase or a clause whosemeaning is understood In other words, ellipsis is simply defined as substitution by zero.Like substitution cohesion which depends on the syntactic category of the presupposedelements, elliptical cohesion consists of nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis and clausal ellipsis

1.3.2.4 Conjunctive cohesion

As Halliday and Hasan (1976: 226) point out “conjunctive elements are cohesive not inthemselves but indirectly, by virtue of their specific meanings; they are not primarilydevices for reaching out into the preceding or following text, but they express certainmeanings which presuppose the presence of other components in the discourse”

E.g He took a cup of coffee after he woke up

The word "after" suggests a sequence, signaling that what is expressed in the first clausefollowed what is expressed in the second one

Conjunctive cohesion can be seen in four ways: addictive (similarly, likewise, in the sameway, and, or…); adversative (although, though, despite, however, nevertheless…), causal(hence, then, so, because, consequently, therefore, for this reason….) and temporal (then,next, after that, just then, previously, at last, finally, at last …)

1.3.2.5 Lexical cohesion

The last type of cohesion according to Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) classification is lexicalcohesion Despite reference, substitution, and ellipsis which are associated with syntacticelements, lexical cohesion has nothing to do with syntactic relations Therefore it is a open-ended and the most difficult cohesive type to define which is vocabulary-driven and based

on lexical relations Halliday and Hasan divided lexical into two main catergories:reiteration and collocation

1.3.2.5.1 Reiteration

Reiteration is a phenomenon when one lexical item refers back to another, to which it isrelated by having a common referent Reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion whichcomprises of the repetition of a lexical item to refer back to a lexical item and number ofthings in between as the use of synonym, near-synonym, or superordinate (Halliday &Hasan, 1976: 278)

From the above notion we can infer that reiteration consists of repetition, synonym,antonym, superordinate The following examples will illustrate each type of reiteration

- Repetition (of a phrase or word)

In most financial centres, there are also branches of lots of foreign banks, largely

doing Eurocurrency business A Eurocurrency is any currency held outside its country of origin The first significant Eurocurrency market was for US dollars in

Europe, but the name is now used for foreign currencies held anywhere in the world (e.g yen in the US, euros in Japan).

(EBS - Stocks and shares, p.91)

- Synonymy (words which have similar meanings, e.g well-known, famous)

This act was repealed in 1999 The Japanese equivalent was abolished the

previous year, and the banking industry in Britain was also deregulated in the

1990s

(EBS - Banking, p.85)

- Antonym (the relation of opposite meaning e.g high, low, day, night)

To reduce the money supply, they sell these bills to commercial banks, and withdraw the cash received from circulation; to increase the money supply the buy

them back, paying with newly created money which is put into circulation in this

- Super-ordinate (the semantic relation between a more general expression that includessome related specific relations e.g flower and rose)

Multinational companies often set up their head offices in countries such as Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Cayman Islands, and the Bahamas, where taxes are

(EBS - The business cycle, p.145)

All the above subtypes of lexical cohesion will be further discussed in the next part of thisthesis.

CHAPTER II: AN ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL COHESIVE DEVICES IN BE

READING TEXTS IN THE COURSE BOOK EBS

2.1 An overview of the study

According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), lexical cohesion is the central device for makingtexts hang together experientially, defining the aboutness of a text Typically, lexicalcohesion makes the most substantive contribution to texture: According to Hasan (1984)and Hoey (1991), around fourty to fifty percent of a text’s cohesive ties are lexical.Therefore, this type of cohesion is definitely important to study As mentioned in the lastchapter, this thesis will adopt the taxonomies provided by Halliday and Hasan, whichclassified lexical cohesion into two main types: reiteration and collocation Reiteration issub-classified into four subtypes: repetition, synonym, antonym, superordinate

In this chapter, the lexical cohesive devices used in six different texts will be analyzed The

six texts studied in this thesis are extracted from six units of the course book EBS which

are included in the ESP course level 2, the course designed for third year students at TUU.This course book was chosen as the main material for teaching and learning ESP of almostall the faculties at TUU Most of the units in the course book contain three components:

1 An informative reading text giving an overview of a particular topic

2 Either listening exercises or shorter authentic reading passage

3 An additional case study, role play, discussion activity or writing exercise

The six sample texts are taken from the first part of each unit They aim atintroducing key business and economic concepts, including a large amount of relevanteconomic terms They are chosen to be examined because of having high frequentoccurrence of lexical cohesive ties The following table presents the origin of each sampletext:

Text Unit

Sample text 1: Types of bank Unit 14: Banking

Sample text 2: Companies Unit 15: Stock and shares

Sample text 4: Market leaders, challengers

and followers

Unit 18: Market structure and competition

Sample text 5: Taxation (and how to avoid

Sample text 6: The business cycle Unit 25: The business cycle

Table 1: BE texts chosen for analysis

The examination of all cohesive ties appeared in the six texts is implemented in thefollowing steps: first, each type of cohesive devices is taken into consideration, inparticular, the author search for every lexical item related to the examined device in all thetexts, then calculate them and sum up The absolute count of each category is thenconverted to the percentage for comparison The counts and percentage of each type andsub-type of cohesive devices are grouped in categories and according to the analyticalpurpose of the study The reason why the author choose to collect the data in this way isthat in order to arrive at any generalizations, large amounts of texts annotated for lexicalties are needed However, manual analysis is very labor-intensive (Hoey, 1991) Thereforethe examination and calculation should be done very carefully, i.e no related item should

be missed Calculating lexical related items of one solely device each time may produce amore credible result when the researcher does not confuse and makes mistake during theinvestigation

The occurrence of lexical cohesive ties found in the six BE texts is presented in thefollowing table:

Types of cohesive devices Number of related items

Table 2: The frequency of presence of lexical cohesive devices in sample texts

The overview of lexical cohesive devices in the six BE texts reveals that: there is apreference of using repetition, synonymy and collocation in written discourses of thetextbook and a lower frequency of other types There are totally 705 lexical itemsidentified in BE reading texts of which 340 are repetitions, account for 48.2% Collocationand synonymy have a similar count of 113 and 112, equivalent to 16.0% and 15.9% Next

is superordinate device with the occurrence of 90 times, accounts for 12.8% and the lowestfrequency is antonymy device with 50 items counted equal to 7.1% The following figureshows the difference in the contribution of lexical cohesive ties in the sample texts

Figure 1: Lexical cohesive devices in BE texts - Frequency of occurrence

2.2 Analysis of lexical cohesive devices in BE reading texts

2.2.1 Reiteration

Reiteration is termed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) and explained as "the repetition of alexical 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 Typically, therefore, a reiterated

lexical item is accompanied by a referent item, usually 'the' or a demonstrative" (Halliday

& Hasan, 1976: 319) The role of a referent is claimed to be absolutely important increating the cohesive force in discourses Obviously, a reiterated item followed by areferent item is therefore cohesive by reference as in the following example:

There is a boy climbing that tree

The boy's going to fall if he doesn't take care (repetition) The lad's going to fall if he doesn't take care (synonym) The child's going to fall if he doesn't take care (superordinate)

2.2.1.1 Repetition

Repetition refers to the same lexical item with the same meaning occurring more than once

in the same discourse Repetition is categorized by Hoey (1991) into simple repetition andcomplex repetition

2.2.1.1.1 Simple repetition

Simple repetition is when a lexical item that has occurred previously is now repeatedexactly or without great changes in grammatical paradigm For example, "is lent" is thesimple repetition of "lends" Here are some more examples:

Examples in text 3:

The British and American central banks also sell and buy short-term (three month)

Treasury Bills as a way of regulating the money supply To reduce the money supply, they sell these bills to commercial banks, and withdraw the cash received

from circulation; to increase the money supply the buy them back, paying with

newly created money which is put into circulation in this way.

In the above example, the verbs sell and buy in the second example are repeated exactly with their presupposed items, the noun phrase money supply is repeated twice without any

change in grammatical function, they are therefore considered simple repetition

One way of making a discourse coherent is repeating important words which are used morethan once in the same discourse In all the sample texts investigated in this thesis, most of

the topic words occur repeatedly For example, in text 3 "Bonds", the topic word bond is repeated 10 times, the text 2 deals with the topic "Stocks and Shares" the word company is used repeatedly 15 times whereas the word tax is repeated up to 19 times in the text

"Taxation (and how to avoid it!)" The followings are some typical examples taken from

sample BE texts:

Examples in text 6:

To reduce income tax liability some employers give highly-paid employees lots of

perks or benefits instead of taxable money, such as company cars, free health

insurance, and subsidized lunches Legal ways of avoiding tax, such as these, are known as loopholes in tax laws Life insurance policies, pension plans and other investments by which individuals can postpone the payment of tax, are known as tax shelters Donations to charities that can be subtracted from the income on which tax is calculated are described as tax-deductible.

Text 6 is about taxation and ways to avoid it, the topic word tax is found in almost every

sentence This helps create a high cohesiveness of the text Text 4 deals with the topic

market structure, the key word market is used repeatedly:

Examples in text 4:

One way to do this is to try to find ways to increase the size of the entire market.

Contrary to a common belief, wholly dominating a market, or having a monopoly,

is seldom an advantage: competitors expand markets and find new uses and users