An Investigation of Lexical Cohesion in Kurdish EFL Students Emails

Abstract

Cohesion, the most important principle and criterion of textuality, is the
connection or the connectedness manifested when the interpretation of one
textual element, i.e., a word located in one sentence is dependent on
another element in the text.

Cohesion is thus one of the text properties that contribute to the
organization of discourse. Coherence has to be clearly distinguished from
cohesion. Hence, cohesion refers to the overt semantic relations in the text,
whereas coherence refers to semantic and pragmatic relations between the
parts of the text.

The three main categories of cohesion are referential cohesion
(anaphoric chains), relational cohesion (connectives and ellipsis) and
lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion, which is the focus of this research
paper, contributes to the ideational (semantic) structuring of discourse. It
refers to the semantic relations between the lexical items in the text; thus it
provides information about the way lexemes are organized in the discourse.

Lexical cohesion is the dependency relationship between words
based on associative relations in common knowledge. Lexical coherence
plays a dominant role in text structure. However, the lack of cohesion in
writing is a problem that plagues many EFL students. The present paper
goal is to help students to overcome this problem in which it has been a
challenge to EFL teachers and researchers alike. Thus, the present research
paper aims at analyzing Kurdish EFL students' emails for the purpose of
finding out their tendency towards using lexical cohesion devices, i.e., the
extent to which they use or avoid using these d