Traversing the lexical cohesion minefield

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The collocation ‘situations happens’ is not typical in native speakercorpora—more frequent collocates of ‘situation’ would be ‘arise’ and ‘occur’,and the plural ‘situations’, as already noted, is not very common. As with theprevious example, the choice of the word ‘situation’ seemsinappropriate—‘developments’ would seem to fit better in the text. Finally, itshould be noted that the student has used an inappropriate colligate, i.e.grammatical partner, in the phrase—‘in’ rather than ‘at’. In his study ofa learner corpus, Flowerdew (op.cit.) found colligation errors to be byfar the most common mistake made by learners, in their use ofsignalling nouns. This being so, it is probably worthwhile introducing thesegeneral nouns to students in some typical phrases, for example the noun‘situation’ could be provided in the frame ‘this situation has arisen ata ...time’.The next stepHaving noted the above issues, there follow a number of brief suggestionsfor teachers to consider when thinking about the teaching of lexicalcohesion to their students in their reading and writing classes.1 Raise awareness of the role of lexical reiterative devices in creatingtextual cohesion. Texts can be analysed for different reiterative devicesand comparisons made between published texts and students’ writing.Salkie’s (op.cit.) workbook contains some exercises specifically aimedat encouraging students to identify reiterative cohesion in texts.Though a useful resource, it should be noted that this is not a bookaimed at EFL learners, and the texts used contain some rather difficultvocabulary.2 Warn students against adopting a simplistic attitude towards the use ofsynonyms. Altered texts can be given to students asking them to identifyinappropriate uses of near synonyms, and students can also bechallenged to choose from a variety of options which word (from a list of‘synonyms’) is missing from a stretch of discourse. Such exercises willhighlight the point that synonymy is a slippery concept.3 Give students practice in using hyponyms and hypernyms of key wordsin their writing. Students are sometimes asked by teachers to use certainspecific words in their writing, and it is not too difficult to develop thiskind of exercise to work on this specific skill. Wordnet 2.1, as notedearlier, is a useful resource for teachers to refer to.4 Be aware of the problem of collocation. As noted above, collocationerrors are pervasive in student attempts to vary their lexis. As much aspossible collocation knowledge must be developed alongside reiterationskill development. Collocation dictionaries or corpus data can be used byteachers to help give students the most typical or strongest collocates ofimportant words.5 Increase student awareness of redundant repetition in their writing.Highlighting overuse may well provide the required stimulus forstudents to begin thinking about lexical ties in their writing. It isimportant to encourage effort here, otherwise students may well justrevert to ‘default’ repetition in the face of difficulties.Traversing the lexical cohesion minefield 219
ConclusionThe use of lexical cohesive ties has been found to be a significantdifferentiating factor between native speaker and non-native speakerwriting (Connor op.cit.: 307), and while it is tempting to postpone a focus ongood writing style in the classroom to advanced level classes, this is probablynot the best course of action to take. While lexical cohesion is a complex area,and fraught with difficulty, it has been suggested in this paper that there arecertain exercise types and awareness-raising activities that can make thesubject a rewarding one for students and teachers to explore together inclass: there are ways to traverse the minefield of lexical cohesion—indeed,some quite interesting ways.Final version received April 2008Notes1 The writer is aware of further work by theseauthors in which they refine this taxonomy, forexample Hasan 1984, 1985, and Halliday 1985.However, the basic types of lexical reiteration,while renamed or reclassified, remain.2 As Connor (1984: 302) points out, substitutionand ellipsis are not as common in writtendiscourse as in conversation.3 It should be noted here that ‘leisuretime’—typically referring to a long period oftime—is not a particularly appropriate synonymfor ‘break’ (a short period of time) in the text.ReferencesCarrell, P. L. 1982. ‘Cohesion is not coherence’.TESOL Quarterly 16/4: 479–88.Connor, U. 1984. ‘A study of cohesion and coherencein English as a second language students’ writing’.Papers in Linguistics 17/1–4: 301–16.Cox, B. E., T. Shanahan, and E. Sulzby. 1990. ‘Goodand poor elementary readers’ use of cohesion inwriting’. Reading Research Quarterly 25/1: 47–65.Flowerdew, J. 2006. ‘Use of signalling nouns ina learner corpus’. Lexical Cohesion and CorpusLinguistics (Special issue). International Journal ofCorpus Linguistics 11/3: 227–47.Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. An Introduction to FunctionalGrammar. London: Edward Arnold.Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion inEnglish. Harlow: Longman.Hasan, R. 1984. ‘Coherence and cohesive harmony’in J. Flood (ed.). Understanding ReadingComprehension. Newark, DE: InternationalReading Association.Hasan, R. 1985. ‘The structure of a text’ inM. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan (eds.). Language,Context and Aspects of Language in a Social SemioticPerspective. Geelong, Victoria: DeakinUniversity Press.Inkpen, D. and G. Hirst. 2006. ‘Building and usinga lexical knowledge base of near-synonymdifferences’. Computational Linguistics 32/2: 223–62.Lea, D. (ed.). 2002. Oxford Collocations Dictionary forStudents of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.McCarthy, M. 1991. Discourse Analysis for LanguageTeachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Mohamed, A. H. and M. R. Omer. 2000. ‘Texture andculture: cohesion as a marker of rhetoricalorganisation in Arabic and English narrative texts’.RELC Journal 31/2: 45–75.Salkie, R. 1995. Text and Discourse Analysis.Florence,KY: Routledge.Shaw, P. and E. T.-K. Liu. 1998. ‘What develops in thedevelopment of second-language writing?’ AppliedLinguistics 19/2: 225–54.Tanskanen, S.-K. 2006. Collaborating TowardsCoherence: Lexical Cohesion in English Discourse.Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins PublishingCompany.Ting, F. 2003. ‘An investigation of cohesive errors inthe writing of PRCtertiary EFL students’. Availableat http://www.stets.org.sg/vol2N2_2003FengTing.PDF. Last accessed 12February 2008.The authorIain McGee’s research interests include investigatingdifferences between teachers’ intuitions aboutlanguage and corpus data, and the teaching ofcollocation. He taught in Kuwait and King FahdUniversity of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia,before moving on to Taibah University, Madinah,Saudi Arabia.Email: idmsjm96@muchomail.com220 Iain McGee
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