Developing cohesion
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Lexical cohesion | page 6 of 6 |
Teaching implications
One of the major problems when reading students' work is that sometimes the reader becomes lost in terms of knowing who is doing what. Students need to repeat words whenever there is a chance that, by not doing so, their reader will be confused or will need to make a guess as to who or what is being referred to.
This problem may arise for two reasons. Sometimes the writer uses a pronoun whose reference is uncertain:
Three terminals are linked over a star wide area network to the administration computer on the city centre campus. It supports financial and personnel services for staff and students. (Student Dissertation)
The problem here is that it could refer to any of three things: the star wide area network, the administration computer or the city centre campus. One of those words needs, therefore, to be repeated.
At other times the student uses two distinct words or expressions without defining them, so it is unclear what each of them means and whether they have the same meaning or refer to different things! Consider the following from an undergraduate report:
3.3 Extent of young people buying film sub-products
3.3.1 Number of young people buying film-related decorations
Among the 200 respondents, nearly half of them (49%) bought decorations related to the film they had seen. Besides, a majority of them (57%) bought film sub-products even though they had not seen the film yet. Therefore, there are many potential customers of film sub-products in the current market.
A check with the author revealed that sub-products and decorations were actually being used interchangeably. The two words meant the same thing as far as she was concerned! This, however, is by no means clear to the reader, so the passage needs to be tidied up. It would have been better for her to decide on which word she wanted to use and to stick with it throughout:
3.3 Extent of young people buying film sub-products
3.3.1 Number of young people buying film sub-products
Among the 200 respondents, nearly half of them (49%) bought sub-products related to the film they had seen. Besides, a majority of them (57%) bought film sub-products even though they had not seen the film yet. Therefore, there are many potential customers of film sub-products in the current market.
It can also be useful to do some activities that will develop students' control over an
area before they begin writing or speaking on that topic. For example, the class could
brainstorm as many words as possible related to the topic and then be guided to organise
the words according to whether they are synonyms 
, antonyms , specific or general words and so on, with the teacher
suggesting words to fill in some of the gaps. As a follow up to this, the students could
be given a text containing a lot of inappropriate repetitions, eg of the word dogs,
and asked to suggest places in which synonyms, more specific words or more general
words could be used.
Introduction
Teaching implications
