THE SKILLS OF WRITING ANSWERS TO KBAT LITERARY TEXTS USING THE METHOD OF DRILLING QUESTIONS FOR UPPER SECONDARY STUDENTS IN MAAHAD KAWALAN

The Bahasa Melayu question paper is divided into two papers ( Paper 1 and Paper 2), with both papers require written essay responses. The literature section is the part of the questions that students are required to answer in the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) exam. There are 13 marks awarded for 4 questions, two of them are questions in the form of KBAT. The aim of this study was to improve secondary school students' skills in writing KBAT answers using drill method. In addition, the researchers compared students' responses to four parts of the questions in the literature section of Bahasa Melayu Paper 2 (1103/2) before and after the drilling method. This study used a qualitative approach in the form of a case study (document analysis). In data collection, 5 classes in Maahad Control were subjected to pre-test and post-test. The study revealed that the pre-test scores of 10 students randomly taken from 5 classes, 3 of them were at the weak level and 7 students were at intermediate level. However, after 6 drilling sessions, the researcher found that the performance of the students improved in the post-test. 2 students reached an intermediate level and 8 students reached a good level in answering literature questions. This proves that students trained with drill method mastered the techniques of answer writing due to the influence of answer discussion which highlights the key words in each question. Meanwhile, teachers still need to guide students on punctuation and the use of appropriate cohesive devices in each part of the answer.

Application of Cohesion Theory in CET-4 Listening Comprehension

Cohesion is a very important part of learning English. The Cohesion Theory of Halliday and Hasan is of great importance for people to acquire the knowledge of cohesion. This study is aimed at applying this Cohesion Theory in CET-4 listening comprehension which is an important test for Chinese college students. This study uses the test papers of CET-4 in June 2021 as examples to demonstrate that it is obvious that there are certain cohesive relations between the listening materials and the correct answers. It is also practicable to apply the Cohesion Theory in listening comprehension of CET-4. It mainly analyzes the cohesive devices applied in figuring out the correct choices by understanding the cohesive relations between the listening materials with the right answers. It demonstrated obviously that there exists the cohesive relations between the listening materials with the right answers in the test, and both the grammatical device and lexical device are often used interactively. The cohesive devices can serve as the important clues for students to make the right choices. The findings of this study suggest that the application of the Cohesion Theory in CET-4 listening comprehension is practicable and effective. It can not only help the students get good performance in the CET-4 tests, the same approach can also be used in other important tests. 

ERROR ANALYSIS OF CONJUNCTION IN EXPOSITORY ESSAY WRITING BY JORDANIAN UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS STUDYING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (EFL)

Academic writing is used a lot in the academic field and general writing as a distinct genre discourse in the linguistic and socio-cultural fields. Good writers generally use well-formed sentences; they often establish connections between sentences. Writing an essay is still a critical problem for most EFL undergraduate students since they are still not able to establish connections between sentences. The purpose of this study is to investigate the usage of conjunctions as cohesive devices in expository essays produced by EFL fourth-year undergraduate students majoring in the English language at the Department of English language and literature, Hashemite University in Jordan. A corpus of 30 expository essays was collected by using a simple purposive sampling technique to answer the questions of the study based on the theory of cohesion analysis by refining the grammatical cohesive related aspect based on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) taxonomy of conjunction. The results of this study confirm earlier studies showing English learners as a foreign language are having difficulty in using conjunctions in their writing. This study contributes to the written discourse and pedagogy within the field of teaching English for academic writing. The study recommends that grammatical cohesive devices and their function should be explained to the students through explicit teaching, not as separated grammatical items but as discourse semantic resources of text creation.

The Use of Cohesive Devices to Provide Coherence in Argumentative Essays of Universitas Negeri Semarang Graduate Students

This study aims to analyze the use of cohesive devices and the chain interaction of cohesive devices to achieve coherence in argumentative essays of Universitas Negeri Semarang graduate students. This study employed descriptive qualitative research design. It focused on cohesion and coherence analysis of students’ writing. The findings of the study showed that all of the types of cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, and reiteration were found in the students’ essays. These cohesive devices provide the coherence of the text through their semantic relation or bound which create the two cohesive chains; identity chains and similarity chains. The interaction between both chains can give explicit signals to guide readers towards the intended interpretation of the text. The result of this chain interaction is known as cohesive harmony. Most of students’ essays achieve coherence because the total tokens of the students’ essays enter more than 50% of chain interaction. Unfortunately, the students overuse certain types of cohesive devices such as repetition in creating the chains.

THE ROLE OF GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN THE TEXT QUALITY AMONG JORDANIAN EFL STUDENTS IN EXPOSITORY ESSAYS

The present paper shares interest that many scholars and linguists have highlighted in investigating the relationship between writing quality and grammatical cohesion devices. The aim of this study is to find out the relationship between the use of grammatical cohesive devices on the overall quality of expository essays produced by EFL fourth-year undergraduate students majoring in the English language at the Department of English language and literature Hashemite University in Jordan. It seeks to determine the efficacy of academic writing by Jordanian EFL students. Thirty purposive samples of compositions were collected and analyzed by the researcher to measure the relationship between the score of the writing quality and the grammatical cohesion devices in students' writing based on (1) analytical scale Jacob et al., (1981), and (2) Halliday and Hasan (1976) taxonomy of grammatical cohesion. The results showed that grammatical cohesive devices did not constitute a statistically significant correlation with the score of writing quality. It also revealed that the EFL students' written compositions were not successful due to their incapability to utilize the different forms of grammatical cohesive devices and their lack of knowledge about effectively using these devices in their academic writing.

Evaluating Major Problems of MA Students of TEFL in Developing Proposals: MA Students and Their Professors’ Perceptions in Focus

This study aimed at evaluating the major problems of MA students of TEFL in developing proposals from the viewpoint of MA students and their professors. This quantitative study enjoyed a descriptive method and presented the frequencies and percentages of the analyzed data. The participants were a sample of 40 MA students of TEFL and 15 professors. They were requested to fill out a separate valid and reliable 40-item questionnaire. These two questionnaires were designed to evaluate students’ viewpoints about writing proposals and professors’ viewpoint about students’ proposals. Since the obtained data were non-parametric, Chi-square test was applied to analyze the data. The findings showed that APA style was not completely taught to MA students. The students had enough familiarity with the layout and physical appearance, and had appropriate knowledge of skills and subskills; however, they did not know how to analyze the data. Professors also believed that students could not explain the implications of the study perfectly in their proposals and could not provide a complete reference section. They also believed that students were not able enough to use cohesive devices. On the other hand, the difference between MA students and professors regarding the issue of affective factors was not statistically significant. The findings of this study will be useful for professors who teach seminar courses, and the administrators of the universities to offer acceptable format for the proposals, and to make students more aware of principles they should follow in proposal writing to submit an acceptable proposal.

Gender Difference: The Use of English Discourse Markers in Business News Articles by Vietnamese Journalists

Discourse markers (DMs) appear in a quite high frequency in both spoken and written language. Moreover, they are not only cohesive devices but also tools which help convey language users’ intentions to their discourse. Research into DMs is, nevertheless, still rare regarding the use of English DMs by Vietnamese writers. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the use of English DMs in business news articles by Vietnamese male and female journalists. To that end, 80 business news articles written in English by Vietnamese journalists were chosen. Kopple’s (1985) [1], Fung’s (2003) [2], and Fraser’s (1996, 1999) [3-4] theoretical frameworks are adapted for data analysis. It was found that both Vietnamese male and female employed English DMs in their writing in a similar way. Female journalists were, nevertheless, found to employ the interpersonal functions of the used English DMs more than their counterparts.

Text Cohesion in English Scientific Texts Written by Saudi Undergraduate Dentistry Students: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Textual and Logical Relations in Oral Biology Texts

This qualitative study examined multimodal cohesive devices in English oral biology texts by eight high-achieving Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the textual and logical cohesive devices in oral biology texts was conducted, employing Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion analysis scheme. The findings showed that students used varied cohesive devices: lexical cohesion, followed by reference and conjunctions. Although ellipsis was minimally employed in the oral biology texts, its discipline-specific uses emerged: the use of bullet points and numbered lists that facilitate recall. The SF-MDA of cohesion in multimodal semiotic resources highlighted the processes underlying construction of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of cohesive devices in oral biology texts. The results indicate that oral biology discourse is interdisciplinary, including a number of subfields in biology. The SF-MDA of pictorial oral biology representations indicates that they include instances of cohesive devices that illustrate and complement verbal texts. The results indicate that undergraduate students need to be provided with a variety of multimodal high-cohesion texts so that they can successfully extend underlying conceptual and logical meaning-making relations.

Substitution and Ellipsis in the Translation of English-Swahili Healthcare Texts

Even though substitution and ellipsis contribute to text cohesiveness just like any other cohesive device, the two grammatical cohesive devices are largely understudied. Focusing on the interplay between translation and cohesion, this study delves into the translation of substitution and ellipsis in Swahili healthcare texts. This study, theoretically anchored on Descriptive Translation Studies, set out to unravel the use of substitution and ellipsis and establish if there is any variation in the use of the two grammatical cohesive devices in the translated Swahili healthcare texts. The data used in the study is extracted from Orang’i (2020) doctoral study. Substitution and ellipsis are the basis for the manual comparison of the coupled pairs from the sample texts. The study has established that ellipsis and substitution are used sparingly in the texts. Though the use of substitution is limited, it emerged that clausal and nominal substitutions were prevalent. Equally, the use of ellipsis is almost non-existent in the Swahili healthcare texts though present in the source texts. The foregoing points to an endeavour by translators to make explicit that which is implicit in the source text and this led to the conclusion that explicitation is a norm in the translation of Swahili healthcare texts. The two cohesive devices are largely about one’s choice and can, to some extent, be avoided or minimally used. Overall, it was implied that substitution and ellipsis are not preferred cohesive devices in Swahili healthcare texts.