A study on lexical cohesive devices from some reading texts of the course book English for Business Study and pedagogical implications for teaching English for third year students at Trade Union University

Nguyễn Xuân Thơm Năm bảo vệ: 2012 Abstract: This study concentrates on analyzing lexical cohesive devices to see how often these devices appear in Business English course book.. The r

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 Phạm Phương Lan

Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn ThS ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh; Mã số: 60 22 15 Người hướng dẫn: Prof Dr Nguyễn Xuân Thơm

Năm bảo vệ: 2012

Abstract: This study concentrates on analyzing lexical cohesive devices to see how often

these devices appear in Business English course book The taxonomy of cohesion provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976) was adopted for description The data for examining were taken from six reading texts in the course book English for Business Studies (EBS) (Ian MacKenzie, 2002) After the data collection, analysis and statistics were implemented, the results of the study were compared within the text and between texts of the same category The results indicated that all types of lexical cohesive ties are found in BE sample texts with different rates all contribute to the text cohesion; and of all the cohesive devices, repetition is used most frequently The findings of the study also reveal some implications for teaching and learning BE in the context of TUU

Keywords: Ngôn ngữ; Tiếng Anh; Từ vựng

Content

Part A: INTRODUCTION

This part introduces the rationale, the scope, the aims, the research questions, the research methodology and the design of the study

1 Rationale of the study

Deriving from the difficulties our students encounter while learning BE, especially BE reading passages which are full of economic and business terms With some experience in teaching General English and English for Specific Purposes, I realize the crucial role of coherence and cohesion in the text understanding and vocabulary learning of students Thereby, I have decided

to conduct a research on lexical cohesive devices from some reading texts of the course book

English for Business Studies hoping that it may help students more in comprehending the

reading texts and learning vocabulary

2 Aims of the study

In brief, the study would seek to answer the following questions:

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?

3 Methods of the study

The study uses description, analysis and statistics research methods to achieve the research

objectives 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 into percentage to compare within a text or among the categories and according to the analytical purposes

4 Significances of the study

This study provides an insight into the use of lexical cohesive devices in BE texts Some pedagogical implications are hopefully to be found in order to assist the writing and reading comprehension of BE texts

Part B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This chapter addressed a review of literature related to concepts of discourse, text, discourse analysis, discourse context, cohesion and coherence, cohesive devices which support this thesis

In each section, the definition or explanation of the key terms is introduced

1.1 Discourse and discourse analysis 1.1.1 Discourse

1.1 Discourse and discourse analysis 1.1.1 Discourse

1.1.2 Discourse and Text

1.1.3 Spoken and written discourse 1.1.4 Discourse Analysis

1.1.5 Discourse Context

1.1.5.1 Context

1.1.5.2 Context of situation

1.2 Cohesion and coherence

1.2.1 Cohesion

1.2.2 Coherence

1.2.3 Cohesion and coherence 1.3 Cohesive devices

1.3.1 Cohesive devices

1.3.2 Classification

1.3.2.1 Referential Cohesion

1.3.2.2 Substitution cohesion

1.3.2.3 Elliptical cohesion

1.3.2.4 Conjunctive cohesion

1.3.2.5 Lexical cohesion

1.3.2.5.1 Reiteration

1.3.2.5.2 Collocation

CHAPTER II: AN ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL COHESIVE DEVICES IN BE READING

TEXTS IN THE COURSE BOOK EBS

In this chapter, the collected data was analyzed and discussed, the findings of the study also answer to the three research questioned raised in the Introduction part

2.1 An overview of the study

This part is devoted to presenting the methodology of the research, including the data collection instruments and procedure and data analysis

The subjects of the study

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 almost all 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 at introducing key business and economic concepts, including a large amount of relevant economic terms They are chosen to be examined because of having high frequent occurrence of lexical cohesive ties The following table presents the origin of each sample text:

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

it!)

Unit 23: Central banking, money and

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

Data analysis methods

The examination of all cohesive ties appeared in the six texts is implemented in the following steps:

Step 1: each type of cohesive devices is taken into consideration, in particular, the author search for every lexical item related to the examined device in all the texts, then calculate them and sum up

Step 2: the absolute count of each category is then converted to the percentage for comparison

Step 3: the count and percentage of each type and sub-type of cohesive devices are grouped in categories and according to the analytical purpose of the study

2.2 Analysis of lexical cohesive devices in BE reading texts

In this section, collected data was analyzed and discussed, the findings of the study answer to the three research questions raised in the Introduction part Specifically, each type of lexical cohesion is examined carefully to see how frequently they appear and why they are used in BE texts, i.e how these devices help students comprehend the texts

2.2.1 Reiteration

2.2.1.1 Repetition

2.2.1.1.1 Simple repetition

2.2.1.1.2 Complex repetition

2.2.1.2 Synonyms and near synonyms

2.2.1.3 Antonymy

2.2.1.4 Superordinates

2.2.2 Collocation

2.2.3 Summary

Major findings will be summarized and some pedagogical implications will be presented in the

next part – CONCLUSION

Part C: CONCLUSION

The conclusion part shows a recapitulation of the study, implications for teaching and learning

BE This section also discusses the limitations of the study as well as some recommendations for further research

1 Major findings of the research

The aims of the study include investigating the kinds of lexical cohesive device and their

frequency of occurrence in EBS text book and providing an insight into the use of these lexical

cohesive devices thereby hopefully assisting the learning and teaching of BE

The findings of the research reveal that all the types of lexical cohesion: reiteration, including repetition, synonymy, antonymy, superordinate; and collocation are common in BE texts of which repetition appears with the highest frequency

The research findings also reveal that some overall features of BE discourses regarding lexical cohesion are identified such as: in BE texts, lexical cohesive devices are used to create a high cohesiveness of the discourses The text is therefore coherent for readers The facts that repetition is used dominantly and that nouns and noun phrases are the most common cases of simple repetition enable readers to identify the topic of the text more easily In BE texts, synonymy is employed as a cohesive device to express meanings differently and therefore, avoid unnecessary repetitions In BE texts, the fact that the majority of synonyms identified falls under the categories of nouns and verbs shows that, one of the linguistic features of BE texts which is determined by the particular purpose of it is introducing key economic terms and clarifying business and economic concepts Similarly, the use of antonyms in BE texts help explain the terms and notions more easily by observing the contrary relations among word pairs, emerging the main idea of each paragraph and the topic of the whole text Hence, it makes the text more

comprehensible for readers The fact that BE texts includes numerous generalizations of business and economic concepts has explained why relational antonyms are used more frequently than contrary antonyms Super-ordinate and collocation are effective ways to create connections among words, phrases, paragraphs and the whole BE text They link words and ideas of a BE text in a logical way therefore create coherence and thus comprehensibility of the text In other words, the more related lexical items are used the more cohesiveness of the text they create

2 Pedagogical implications

The above concluding remarks also imply some suggestions for the teaching and learning

of the reading and writing activities in BE as follows:

 In exploiting collocation in BE reading and writing activities, teachers should set up learning tasks such as:

- identify the possibility of the co-occur tendency of some certain words in BE discourses,

- find the topic of the reading texts through the elicited sequence of related words,

- make use of collocations in reading text to write a passage which is cohesive and coherent,

- summarize the paragraph or the whole text using given collocations,

- translate the passage into the source language

It should be noted that during translating task students should be aware of collocations, in particular, the meaning of a collocation should be taken into account instead of the dictionary meaning of the individual words This therefore dissuade them from word-by-word translating or mistranslating

For learners, collocation also helps them greatly in learning vocabulary Particularly, new vocabulary can be more easily remembered when it is learned in its context, i.e in collocation relations As a result, new vocabulary can be recalled at any time and retained in learners for a long time In addition, learners should be encouraged to use dictionary of collocation especially when they do writing and translating tasks Hence, collocation helps enlarge the vocabulary of students

 In exploiting repetition device, teachers may ask students to elicit the most repeated items

in the whole text to guess the topic of it This helps students greatly in interpreting the text

3 Limitations and Suggestions for further studies

Although the study has done, it is unavoidable that there are some limitations of the research due to the limited scope, the time constraint and other objective factors It is also regrettable that small number of sample texts may not help create the most valid analytical

results

Future researches can shed some light on:

 Other cohesive devices such as: grammatical, topical and logical cohesion of BE written discourses to improve the teaching and learning of BE

 Evaluating the affects of cohesive devices knowledge on the students' abilities in learning writing and reading BE discourses

 The causes of common errors made by BE learners when using cohesive devices to create and interpret BE discourses and solutions for it

References

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