The Use of Cohesive Devices in Korean EFL Writing across Different Proficiency Levels

초록

This study examines cohesive devices in the essays written by Korean EFL college learners across four common reference levels (CEFR) in the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). The methodology used to analyze all cohesion features in this learner corpus is the assessment of cohesion using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO). In order to see whether cohesion would vary across different proficiency levels in Korean EFL writing, this study examined fine-grained indices of four different kinds of components related to cohesive elements, i.e., lexical overlap, connectives, semantic overlap, and givenness. The statistical results suggest that the variable of lexical overlap (i.e., binary adjacent sentence overlap content lemmas) is a stronger predictor of EFL writing performance than the other variables of text cohesion. These findings expand previous corpus-based results regarding the evaluation of EFL writing quality, cohesive features in particular. The current study will bring about the expansion of new research that can investigate the role of cohesion analyses in accounting for foreign language writing proficiency. © 2022 KASELL All rights reserved.

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