Use of Cohesive Ties in English as a Foreign Language Students’ Writing

This study aims to understand certain linguistic and semantic resources for the text construction, namely the constructs of cohesion, coherence. The analysis of cohesive ties was conducted on the writing samples of 40 subjects (20 most coherent and 20 least coherent) Iranian undergraduates of English. This prompted us to identify the dominant types of cohesive devices used in most coherent writing samples. The analysis of data revealed that both the writing samples were found highly dense in the use of reference. The correlation analysis also didn’t show any overlap between the referential ties and coherence.. Hence, we can claim that referential ties don’t play any role in making a text coherent. Among the five major types of cohesive classes, substitution and ellipsis were found least frequently used in both the writing samples. Their occurrence was less than 1%. It, therefore, seems that the two types of cohesive devices aren’t widely used in written discourse. In the collective data, since, their occurrence is not even noticed in any of the writing scripts where as they could be the most dominant type of cohesion of spoken discourse.