Investigating the Use of Cohesive Devices in EFL Learners’ Essay Writing

Abstract

This descriptive study investigates the use of cohesive devices by third year English Foreign Language learners when writing their essays. It seeks at reaching two aims. The first aim is to check whether students are familiar with all types of cohesive devices, while the second is to identify the most predominant cohesive devices used by the students. In this research, it was assumed that third year English Foreign Language learners are not familiar with all types of cohesive devices, and that they tend to overuse some types of cohesive devices over others. In order to achieve the aforementioned aims, a questionnaire along with a document analysis have been used. The questionnaire was responded by (81) third year students of English at Mohamed Seddik Ben Yahia Jijel University out of (263), whereas the corpus to be analysed consisted of (16) argumentative essays. The outcomes of this study showed that students are not familiar with all the types of cohesive devices; moreover, the students relied heavily on the grammatical cohesive devices with (811) items compared with their use of lexical ones by (89) .Relying on the results obtained, some pedagogical recommendations were suggested