DECLARATION I hereby declare that no part of the enclosed Master Thesis has been copied or reproduced by me from any other’s work without acknowledgement and that the thesis is originally written by me under strict guidance of my supervisor. Hanoi, 03/12/2013 Candidate Dao Kim An Approved by Dr. Ho Ngoc Trung i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest thanks firstly to my supervisor, Dr. Ho Ngoc Trung, who has enthusiastically helped and much encouraged me to finish the research paper.
Without his experienced guidance and valuable comments, I cannot complete the thesis on time. My gratitude is also sent to all of my lecturers in my M. courses at Post- Graduate Studies, Hanoi Open University. Their precious and professional lectures and tutoring have helped me a great deal in understanding profound concepts of the field in English linguistics while I attended the courses.
I am indebted to my friends and colleagues at College of Statistics for their suggestion, encouragement and enthusiasm in helping me distribute the survey questionnaire and collect information for the study. Last but not least, I owe the completion of this study to my family: my parents, my relatives and especially my husband who gives me supports and encouragement throughout the study. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration………………………………………………………………………….ii Table of contents……………………………………………………………………iii List of abbreviations……………………………………………………………….vi List of tables, figures and diagrams……………………………………………….vii PART I: INTRODUCTION. Rationale of the study.
Aims and objectives of the study. Scope of the study. Methods of the study. Design of the study.
4 PART II: DEVELOPMENT.6 Chapter 1: Theoretical Background. The concept of discourse. Discourse and discourse analysis. Discourse and text.
Spoken and written discourse. The concept of cohesion. Cohesion and coherence. Cohesive devices and classification.
Setting of the study. An overview of College of Statistics. Subjects of the study. Data collection procedures.
34 Chapter 3: Findings and discussions. Grammatical cohesive devices. Lexical cohesive devices. Findings from the survey questionnaire.
About subjects’ information. About teaching and learning of cohesive devices in English texts. Students’ mistakes in translating cohesive devices in economic texts. Implications for the teaching and learning of cohesive devices in English texts in general and economic texts in particular.
Some suggested solutions to improve College of Statistics students’ capabilities in translating English economic texts.62 iv PART III: CONCLUSION. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further studies .71 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 1. ESP: English for specific purposes 2.
COS: College of Statistics 3. MA: Master of Arts 4. BE: Business English vi LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES AND DIAGRAMS Tables: Table 1.1: Type of cohesion .2: Grammatical and Lexical cohesion .3: The description of reiteration .1: List of sample texts and their origin .1: Reference in economic texts .2: Substitution in economic texts .3: Ellipsis in economic texts .4: Conjunction in economic texts .5: Frequency of grammatical cohesive devices in English economic texts.6: Frequency of lexical cohesive devices in English economic texts….7: Frequency of occurrence of general nouns in English economic texts.1: Percentage of Grammatical cohesive devices in English economic texts.2: The percentage of lexical cohesive devices in English economic texts. 19 vii PART I: INTRODUCTION 1.
Rationale of the study For many years, linguists were concerned with the analysis of single sentences which focused on morphology and phonology areas. Then, the attention was shifted to the sentence level by the advent of Chomsky’s transformational Generative Grammar (1957). However, the analysis was not really adequate because it still focused on the formal properties of language rather than achieving meaning (Coulthard, 1977). Cook (1989) states that linguists have become aware of the use of context and language function.
This awareness came with Harris’s paper published with the title “Discourse Analysis” in 1952. Generally, discourse analysis, or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event. From the beginning of its appearance, Discourse Analysis has taken up in a variety of social science disciplines. The principal concern of discourse analysis is to examine how any language produced by given participants whether spoken or written is used in communication for a given situation in a given setting.
Allen and Corder (1974:200) said that “discourse analysis is taken to be investigation into the formal devices used to connect sentences together”. Discourse analysis is now a rapidly expanding field, providing insights into various aspects of language in use and therefore of great importance to language teaching. In the early days, language teaching has been concerned with pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary; however, it is now Discourse Analysis that raises our awareness of how to put this knowledge into action to gain successful communication. With the globalization of economy and the development of multi-national trade, English economic texts – as a typical written representative of communicative way in business transactions – has been widely recognized as important documents in business negotiation and communications, even though their writing often directly influences the result of communications.
At present, the linguists and 1 scholars at home and abroad have conducted a great deal of in-depth studies of its features from different perspectives. However, most of the previous studies focus only on explaining grammar and vocabulary, on stylistic features or on the economy of language, and have not attached enough importance on cohesive devices, which are indispensable for a text to convey a complete and coherent meaning. Directed against this, the author intends to make an exploration of cohesive devices in English economic texts to reveal the in-depth meaning of economic texts and the function of achieving coherence in economic texts. To be able to access to the world’s economic information, students are required to read and understand written documents in English in relation to their field of study.
Also, translating from English into Vietnamese happens to become an important aspect for them to make use of related economic information worldwide. Exchange of information requires accurate transfer of knowledge from one language into another. Thus, the acquiring of appropriate translation skills and strategies is essential to manage efficient rendering of economic texts. As a teacher of College of Statistics (COS), I myself notice a number of problems facing my students when they deal with translating economic texts, of which how to analyze and translate cohesive devices appearing in economic texts seems to be one of the most difficult problems for them.
I also realise the essential role of cohesion and coherence in the text understanding, vocabulary learning and translation learning of students. For the above reasons, I have decided to conduct a research on cohesive devices in economic texts as a case study at College of Statistics. Hopefully, this thesis may provide an insight into the importance of cohesive devices in economic texts and help to improve students’ understanding of economic texts, as well as enhancing their skills of translating economic texts. Aims and objectives of the study The main aim (or goal) of the study is to investigate the characteristic features of cohesive devices in English economic texts and apply the findings to the teaching 2 and learning of English at COS.
From this aim, the study has the following objectives. Firstly, the study mainly aims at analyzing the cohesive features in English economic texts, in order to provide a deeper insight into the important role of cohesive devices in economic texts. Secondly, the researcher also carries out a study at COS with an attempt to explore the students’ mistakes in translating cohesive devices in texts in general and economic texts in particular. Based on this case study, some solutions are suggested to improve COS students’ capabilities in translating English texts.
Research questions In order to achieve the objectives, the study is meant to find out the answers to the following research questions: 1. How are common cohesive devices used in economic texts? 2. What are the students’ common mistakes in translating cohesive devices in English economic texts? 3. What are some solutions to improving COS students’ capabilities in translating English texts? 4.
Scope of the study Studying cohesive devices in all types of economic texts will be a very broad research, so it is impossible to cover all. For the feasibility of this thesis, the study focuses on one of the most popular types of economic texts: regular texts about economic matters those are extracted from course books for students at College of Statistics. Methods of the study In order to find out the answers to the research questions, the study makes use of the methods of descriptive analysis, discourse analysis, error analysis as well as statistical techniques. After collecting randomly economic texts from books used for students in Finance and Banking, Business English, Business 3 management, the data are selected, analyzed and grouped into categories so that the subject can be described clearly.
Examples, tables and figures are also provided to illustrate the description. For the Case study at COS, the writer uses personal observations and designs a survey questionnaire in order to investigate the students’ common mistakes in translating cohesive devices in English economic texts. The steps of the study are as follows: 1) Collecting the economic texts from ESP coursebooks at College of Statistics 2) Studying the materials to assure the reliability and the validity 3) Analyzing the data and discussing the findings. 4) Designing a questionnaire and conducting a survey on the target students in combination with personal observations to explore students’ common mistakes in translating cohesive devices in economic texts.
5) Suggesting solutions to improving College of Statistics students’ capabilities to translate English economic texts and specifically translate cohesive devices in English economic texts. Design of the study The thesis is designed in three main parts: Part I: INTRODUCTION consists of rationale, aims and objectives, research questions, scope, methods and design of the study. Part II: DEVELOPMENT includes three chapters: Chapter 1, Theoretical Background, provides Literature review of some previous studies and theoretical background of cohesive devices and economic texts Chapter 2, Methodology, refers to the researching approach of the study and the method to collect and analyze the collected data to help the author achieve the best results in the study. 4 Chapter 3, Findings and Discussion, analyzes the cohesive devices used in English economic texts and explores the students’ common mistakes and difficulties in translating cohesive devices in economic texts.
Chapter 4, Implications, offers the teachers and students some solutions to the teaching and learning of cohesive devices and developing COS students’ translating skills. Part III: CONCLUSION summarizes the main points discussed in the study. The study ends with the "REFERENCES" which list all the materials and sources of information used in the study. 5 PART II: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: Theoretical Background 1.
Literature review Although many studies on cohesion (or cohesive devices) have been carried out in the field of teaching English all over the world, the greatest number of researchers emphasized the relationship of the use of cohesive devices to the quality of writing of a text or coherence. The study of Johnson (1992) sought to find out the relationship of cohesion to overall writing quality of a text. To achieve this, she correlated the amount and type of cohesive devices used in three groups of students’ essays to the overall quality rating of these essays given by the respective writing teachers of each group. The results revealed that there is no significant difference between the amount and number of cohesive ties used to the overall quality of essays among three groups.
Palmer’s (1999) study is concerned with coherence and cohesion in the English classroom. The purpose of his study was to analyze the way non-native English language students create coherent texts. Results have suggested that lexical reiteration is often used by ESL students in order to create coherent texts. As in Johnson’s study, Meisuo (2000) also investigated qualitatively the relationship of cohesive ties in the expository essays of Chinese students with their quality of writing.