VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ---------------------***---------------------- NGUYỄN THỊ MINH DESIGNING EXERCISES ON COHERENCE AND COHESION ON THE BASIS OF IELTS MODEL ESSAYS AND EXPERIMENTING THEM IN TEACHING AND LEARNING IELTS WRITING (THIẾT KẾ BÀI TẬP VỀ TÍNH MẠCH LẠC VÀ LIÊN KẾT DỰA TRÊN CÁC BÀI LUẬN IELTS MẪU VÀ NGHIÊN CỨU THỬ NGHIỆM TRONG DẠY HỌC VIẾT LUẬN IELTS) M.A THESIS (Program II) Major: English Linguistics Code: 60.15 Hanoi, August 31st, 2010 z VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE DEPARTMENT ---------------------***---------------------- NGUYỄN THỊ MINH DESIGNING EXERCISES ON COHERENCE AND COHESION ON THE BASIS OF IELTS MODEL ESSAYS AND EXPERIMENTING THEM IN TEACHING AND LEARNING IELTS WRITING (THIẾT KẾ BÀI TẬP VỀ TÍNH MẠCH LẠC VÀ LIÊN KẾT DỰA TRÊN CÁC BÀI LUẬN IELTS MẪU VÀ NGHIÊN CỨU THỬ NGHIỆM TRONG DẠY HỌC VIẾT LUẬN IELTS) M.A THESIS (Program II) Major: English Linguistics Code: 60. Hoàng Văn Vân Hanoi, August 31st, 2010 z vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Statement of Authorship i Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Abbreviation iv List of Tables and Diagrams v Table of content vii Introduction 1 1. Rationale of the Study 1 2. Aims and Objectives 3 3.
Scope of the Study 3 4. Significance of the Study 4 5. Methods of the Study 4 6. Organization 5 Chapter 1: Literature Review 6 1.
Cohesion versus Coherence 6 1. Cues for Coherent Representation 7 1. Patterns of Essay Organization 16 1. Grammar and Mechanics 20 1.
An Overview on IELTS Writing Tasks 21 Chapter 2: Exercises on Coherence and Cohesion Built on the Basis of IELTS 22 Model Essays 2. Subjects of Using the Exercises 22 2. Aims and Objectives of the Exercises 22 2. Uses of the Exercises 23 2.
Approaches to Designing the Exercises 23 z viii 2. Process Approaches- Features Applied for 25 Designing the Exercises 2. Data for Designing the Exercises 27 2. Procedures of Designing the Exercises 27 2.
Specifications of the Exercises 27 2. Organization of the Exercises 27 2. Types of the Exercises 30 2. Sources of the Exercises 33 2.1 Presenting an Opinion 39 2.
2 Examining Causes and Effects 53 2. 3 Outlining Problems and Solutions 58 Chapter 3. Design of the Study 64 3. Data Collection Instrument 65 3.
Data Collection Procedures 67 3. Limitation of the Study 74 5. Suggestions for Further Studies 75 References 77 Appendices I z iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IELTS International English Language Testing System HCSs Holistic coherence scores α Level of significance H0 Null hypothesis H1 Alternative hypothesis z v LIST OF DIAGRAMS AND TABLES Diagrams Page Diagram 1. “Block” Organization- Cause & Effect Organization Pattern (Exercise 13) 54 Diagram 2.
“Chain” Organization- Cause & Effect Organization Pattern (Exercise 13) 54 Tables Page Table 1. Argument Patterns 17 Table 2: The Writing Process 25 Table 3: Product Approach vs. Process Approach 25 Table 4. Structure of an Essay (Exercise 3) 43 Table 5.
Conjunctions and References/ Transition Signals (Exercise 9) 48 Table 6. Lexical Cohesive Devices (Exercise 10) 49 Table 7. Signposts of Arguments and Opinions 50 Table 8: Checklist 51 Table 9. Conjunctions and Markers of Causes and Effects (Exercise 19) 57 Table 10.
Lexical Cohesive Devices (Exercise 20) 57 Table 11. Sentence Structures of Cause and Effect (Exercise 21) 58 Table 12. Quasi-experimental Design 65 Table 14: Experimental group: paired samples statistics (n=10) 70 Table 15: Control group: paired samples statistics (n=11) 70 Table 16: Differences between the experimental and control groups’ mean scores 70 (n=21) Table 17. Structure of an Essay (Key to Exercise 3) VII Table 18.
Organization Pattern of Model Essay 1 (Key to exercise 5) IX Table 19. Organization Pattern of Model Essay 2 (Key to exercise 5) X Table 20. Organization Pattern of Model Essay 3 (Key to exercise 5) XI Table 21. Conjunctions and References/ Transition Signals (Key to Exercise 9) XIII Table 22.
Lexical Cohesive Devices (Key to Exercise 10) XV Table 23. Grammatical and Mechanic Mistakes (Key to Exercise 18) XVII Table 24. Lexical Cohesive Devices (Key to Exercise 20) XIX z vi Table 25: Holostic Coherence Scores on the Pre- and Post-tests of the XXII Experimental and Control Groups Table 26: Experimental and Control Groups’ Pre-tests: F-test Two Sample for XXII Variances Table 27: Experimental & Control Group’ Pre-tests: T-test Two-Sample Assuming XXIII Equal Variances Table 28: Experimental Group’s Pre-test and Post-test: T-test Paired Two Sample XXIV for Means Table 29: Control Group’s Pre-test and Post-test: T-test Paired Two Sample for XXIV Means Table 30: Differences between the Experimental and Control Group’ Mean XXV Scores: F-test Two-sample for Variances Table 31: Differences between the Experimental and Control Group’ Mean XXVI Scores: T-test Two-sample Assuming Unequal Variances z 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the Study The choice of this study was prompted by both theoretical and practical inspirational sources.
Theoretically, designing exercises on cohesion and coherence on the basis of IELTS model essays was inspired by a matter of necessity. Cohesion and coherence are actually regarded as the important aspects of language use. The knowledge of cohesion and coherence is very essential in discourse construction and comprehension for communication. According to McNamara and Kintsch (1996), text cohesion is a driving factor of comprehension, and moreover, text characteristics critically interact with readers‟ abilities.
In other words, the awareness of these two elements may help writers to construct good essays with coherence and cohesion so that readers can understand it more easily. Many researchers also affirm that coherence backed by cohesion is an important factor in determining essay writing quality (Stein and Albro, 1997; Shapiro and Hudson, 1997; Hoover, 1997; Grabe and Kaplan, 1996). In addition, the preference for this study was also prompted by the fact that theory of coherence and cohesion and IELTS model essays can be found in a variety of books, namely Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan (1976), What makes a text coherent? by Bamberg (1984), Coherence, Cohesion, and Writing Quality by Witte and Faigley (1980), or in studies such as Conjunctions as Devices of Grammatical Cohesion in English Written Discourse by Thái Thị Bạch Yến (1998), An Analysis of Topical Cohesion in English Socio-Political news Discourse, Exploring the Role of Model Essays in the IELTS Writing Test: A Feedback Tool by Makoto Abe (2008), and on websites like http://www.cc/blog/sdrex/29671929. Nevertheless, there have not been any works that build and experiment a system of exercises on coherence and cohesion based on IELTS model essays in the context of Vietnamese learners.
The writing section in the websites or books designed for IELTS usually comprises exercise questions, useful resources of vocabulary and expressions, practice tests and the answer keys. Remarkably, the website http://ilsielts.com/2009/05/ielts- z 2 essays-exercise-in-coherence-and.html, the book Writing Academic English by Oshima, A and Hogue, A. (1999) have some exercises on cohesion and coherence in IELT essays, but they are too few, not systematic, and especially they do not cover the ones that help students recognize and know how to achieve these two elements in different functions of IELTS essay writing, which are often asked in the IELTS. Besides, the study on Japanese students named An Analysis of Topical Cohesion in English Socio- Political news Discourse, Exploring the Role of Model Essays in the IELTS Writing Test: A Feedback Tool by Makoto Abe (2008) shows that model texts (sample answers) as a source of feedback in second language writing play a substantial role.
Nevertheless, it does not deal with the role of exercises on coherence and cohesion in IELTS essays. Therefore, this thesis was conducted with the aims of building a system of exercises on coherence and cohesion in different functions of IELTS writing based on IELTS model essays and experimenting them in the teaching and learning of IELTS writing. Practically, more and more students attend IELTS courses in Vietnam, and the writing task of this test system requires coherence and cohesion to be an important criterion in marking. However, can Vietnamese students write IELTS essays coherently? After years of study, Vietnamese learners have been capable of writing an English composition with few grammatical or spelling mistakes, but the overall coherence have not been satisfactory.
This may result from the fact that many Vietnamese teachers of English still value the grammatical correctness of sentences over the appropriateness of organising and linking rules in a written text or speech under the many years‟ influence of Bloomfieldian and Chomskian schools of linguistics, while Discourse Analysis is still a new subject to most Vietnamese linguistics though there has been attention from linguistics to this new branch with several works on Vietnamese discourses such as the ones by Hoang Van Van (2006), Nguyen Hoa (2000) and this fact, as Hoang Van Van (2006) states, is the result of „lack of a systematic theoretical framework‟. Besides, students have concentrated only on learning as much grammar and vocabulary as possible, ignoring the question of how to build a persuasive speech or writing. Similarly, being familiar with looking at the sentence level, they seem only to focus on writing correct sentences and learning new words and phrases from sample essays but not to pay attention to the z 3 coherence and cohesion of essays. As a result, they may have a good knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, and they may be very good at making correct separate sentences, but they cannot write IELTS essays coherently as required to get good scores.
The systematic exercises on coherence and cohesion in IELTS model essays could be a solution to this problem of teaching and learning English writing. Aims and Objectives This thesis mainly aims at designing exercises on coherence and cohesion on the basis of model IELTS essay for intermediate students, who start an IELTS course to prepare for taking IELTS to study abroad. To achieve this major goal, the following objectives are set for exploration: - reviewing theoretical background of coherence and cohesion, - building a system of exercises on the basis of IELTS model essays that can help intermediate students to become aware of coherence and cohesion and to write coherent essays, and - testing the hypothesis that a system of exercises on coherence and cohesion built on the basis of IELTS model essays would have great effects on students‟ performance to write their own IELTS essays coherently. Scope of the Study This thesis focuses on building exercises on coherence and cohesion on the basis of IELTS model essays and experimenting them in teaching and learning IELTS essay writing.
The exercises are only concerned with the most common IELTS essays of Writing Task 2, in which writers present opinions, examine causes and effects, and outline problems and solutions because of their important role in IELTS writing and also owing to the constraints of time and page number of this thesis. Besides, the experiment only checks whether these exercises have an effect on students‟ performance of writing coherent IELTS model essays in order that further researches can be decided to be carried on or not. Significance of the Study The exercises on cohesion and coherence of IELTS model essays could be, to some degree, significant to the teaching and learning not only IELTS essay writing in particular but also academic writing in general. This study might play a remarkable role in teaching and learning IELTS writing because coherence and cohesion are an important criterion of marking in IELTS writing, which the need of studying is increasing dramatically in Vietnam, yet most Vietnamese students have difficulty in writing coherent essays.
In addition to this potentially good point, this study might supply materials to teach not only IELTS writing particularly but also academic writing generally since the academic writing test of the IELTS includes two tasks of writing Academic English, which is often required in English-medium academic education.