Lexical Cohesion in Turkish and in English

Abstract

Though writing is highly dependent on knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, it is more than the sum of grammar and vocabulary knowledge. In line with the importance discourse competence gives to the ability to produce unified written or spoken discourse that shows coherence and cohesion, learners' ability to produce successive sentences that are linked through rules of discourse, apart from producing grammatically correct sentences, has been highlighted. In the light of insights gained from a large quantity of discourse-based studies on the process of coherence and cohesion behavior of EFL/ESL learners, methodologists and language teachers have realized the need to have more than grammar knowledge to produce meaningful texts in English. In conformity with the saliency attached to coherence and cohesion in discourse, the focus of research since the early 1980s on writing has been coherence problems of EFL/ESL learners. The purpose of this study is to investigate EFL learners' ability in composing coherent texts in their first language and in English as their foreign language, and to investigate whether there are similarities between EFL learners' composing cohesive/coherent texts both in Turkish and in English. The study was conducted at Anadolu University, School of Foreign Languages with the participation of 40 students. The data consisted of written accounts of a story in both languages based on a set of pictures with eight episodes. The analysis of the data reveals striking similarities between English and Turkish in terms of the employment of lexical cohesion. Discussions and implications related to the findings will be made in detail.