Exploring Cross-Sentence Cohesive Devices in Essay Writings of First Year Turkish Students

Academic essay writing relies heavily on cohesion. It is the grammatical and lexical linking within a text or sentence that holds a text together and gives it meaning. Cohesion related to the broader concept of coherence is important for clarity and readability of a piece of writing. There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical cohesion which is based on structural content and lexical cohesion which is based on lexical content and background knowledge. Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify five general categories of cohesive devices that create coherence in texts, namely reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. The first four ones are grammatical in nature, while the fifth one is content-laden in nature. The grammatical cohesion types concern with the use of items such as pronouns (e.g., I, you, she/he, our, its, mine, etc.), or versatile words (e.g., do and so), and conjunctions (e.g., and, but, then, however, etc.). The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the cross-sentence cohesive devices in the essay writings of Turkish students based on the work of Halliday and Hasan (1976). The participants were first-year English Translation and Interpreting (n= 31) and English Language and Literature (n= 44) students who had taken the Advanced English Writing Skills course (İleri İngilizce Yazı Becerileri) at a Turkish private university in the fall semester of 2022-2023 academic year. The data for the present study comes from the final exam papers. The students had to develop an exploratory, descriptive, argumentative, or narrative essay between 400-450 words. 75% of the students (n= 56) who achieved the highest scores in the exam were randomly selected and involved in the study. The results revealed that the students employed both the grammatical and lexical cohesion in their essays. The most frequently used categories of cohesive devices were reference and conjunction.