Monthly Archive for January, 2010

A Comparative Analysis of Grammatical and Lexical Cohesive Devices in Selected Authentic Texts by K U Ihemere is now available from The Learner imprint.

Despite years of practice in reading, many learners find difficulty in making sense of texts they want to read. A number of reasons have been given for this difficulty in comprehension experienced by foreign learners of English. Ranging from failure to interpret the writer’s cohesive signals as intended; lack of practice in applying “grammatical” knowledge when reading; lack of practice with texts containing a variety of cohesive features; to the tradition of teaching such features as part of the grammatical system and practicing them in isolation and at single sentence level in grammar/or writing lessons. Hence, this book presents the results of a comparative analysis of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in selected British newspaper reports and short stories, identifying the cohesive devices that tend to occur more frequently in these texts. The findings indicate that students’ in reading and writing classes can benefit from the rich lexical contents of short stories as well as the formal style and specialist lexis in newspaper reports. Therefore, EFL teachers will benefit their students by using a combination of these types of texts in reading and writing classes. Additionally, they buttress the view that insights from discourse analysis can help teachers refine their decision-making processes of text selection and the teaching of vocabulary, reading and writing skills. It also offers some possible classroom activities that might be useful in developing students’ reading and writing skills at the intermediate to advanced level of study, based on the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices attested in the study.