ELT Journal Advance Access published online on July 29, 2008
ELT Journal, doi:10.1093/elt/ccn040
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Traversing the lexical cohesion minefield
Iain McGee's research interests include investigating differences between teachers' intuitions about language and corpus data, and the teaching of collocation. He taught in Kuwait and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia, before moving on to Taibah University, Madinah, Saudi Arabia
Email: idmsjm96{at}muchomail.com
 |
Abstract |
|---|
When teachers hear the word ‘cohesion’, they usually think of grammatical cohesion—an aspect of cohesion reasonably well covered in student books and teacher materials. However, occupying an area that straddles both lexis ‘proper’ and cohesion lies ‘lexical cohesion’. In what follows, it is argued that the teaching and learning of certain aspects of lexical cohesion is problematic, and that this state of affairs may be behind the current neglect of this subject in EFL materials and classrooms. The paper begins with a brief overview of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) classification of lexical cohesion, and then looks, in turn, at four types of cohesive device. Learners’ uses of these different cohesive ties are discussed, the obstacles to correct usage are noted, and suggestions are made as to how teachers can help students to develop this aspect of their writing.