PHƯƠNG TIỆN LIÊN kết văn BẢN TRONG SÁCH GIÁO TRÌNH ENGLISH FOR ECONOMICS CHO SINH VIÊN năm 3, KHOA SPTA, ĐHNN, ĐHQGHN

This study analyzes lexical cohesive devices to see how often they appear in Business English course book, from which conclusions are made for both teachers and students in hopes of improving reading economic texts skill and broadening specialized vocabulary. The description of data was adopted from the taxonomy of cohesion by Halliday and Hasan (1976). The data for analysis were taken from five reading texts in the course book English for Economics by Assoc. Prof. Nguyễn Xuân Thơm (PhD.). After data collection, analysis and statistic were implemented, and the results of the study were compared within the text. The results revealed that all types of lexical cohesive devices found in the BE sample texts at different rates all contributed to the text cohesion; and of all the cohesive devices, repetition is used most frequently. At the end of the study, some implications for teaching and learning BE have been made in context of ULIS.

This study analyzes lexical cohesive devices to see how often they appear inBusiness English course book, from which conclusions are made for both teachers andstudents in hopes of improving reading economic texts skill and broadeningspecialized vocabulary The description of data was adopted from the taxonomy ofcohesion by Halliday and Hasan (1976) The data for analysis were taken from fivereading texts in the course book English for Economics by Assoc Prof Nguyễn XuânThơm (PhD.) After data collection, analysis and statistic were implemented, and theresults of the study were compared within the text The results revealed that all types

of lexical cohesive devices found in the BE sample texts at different rates allcontributed to the text cohesion; and of all the cohesive devices, repetition is usedmost frequently At the end of the study, some implications for teaching and learning

BE have been made in context of ULIS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Declaration i

Acknowledgement ii

Abstract iii

Table of contents iv

List of abbreviation vii

List of tables and figures viii

PART I: INTRODUCTION 1

-1 Title of the paper 1

-2 Rationale of the study 1

-3 Scope of the study 2

-4 Objectives of the study 2

-5 Research questions 2

-6 Methods of the study 3

-6.1 Data collection instrument 3

-6.2 Data collection procedure 3

-6.3 Data analysis method 3

-7 Significance of the study 3

PART II: DEVELOPMENT 4

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 4

-1 Discourse and discourse analysis 4

-1.1 Discourse 4

-1.2 Discourse and text 4

-1.3 Spoken and written discourse 6

-1.4 Discourse analysis 7

-1.5 Discourse context 8

-2 Cohesion and coherence 9

-2.1 Cohesion 9

-2.2 Coherence 9

-3 Cohesive devices 10

-3.1 Cohesive devices 10

-3.2 Classification 10

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 13

-1 Research design 13

-2 Setting of the study 13

-3 Participants 14

-4 Data collecting instruments 14

-4.1 Observation of documents 14

-5 Data analyzing procedure 15

-6 Data analysis methods 15

-6.1 Content analysis 15

-6.2 Statistical analysis 16

CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 17

-1 An overview of the study 17

-2 Analysis of lexical cohesive devices in BE reading texts 18

-2.1 Reiteration 18

-2.2 Collocation 31

PART THREE: CONCLUSION 34 REFERENCES - 40 - APPENDICES I APPENDIX I I APPENDIX II IV APPENDIX III VII APPENDIX IV X APPENDIX V XIII APPENDIX VI XVI

-LIST OF ABBREVIATION

Assoc Prof – Associate Professor

BE – Business English

EFE – English for Economics

ESP – English for Specific Purpose

FELTE – Faculty of English Language Teacher Education MOET – Ministry of Education and Training

ULIS – University of Languages and International Studies VNU – Vietnam National University

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1 – List of texts analyzed in the study

Table 2 – Number of lexical cohesive devices in sample texts

Table 3 – Frequency of appearance of Repetition

Table 4 – Frequency of appearance of Synonym

Table 5 – Frequency of appearance of Antonym

Table 6 – Frequency of appearance of antonym’s sub-types

Table 7 – Frequency of appearance of Superordinate

Table 8 – Frequency of appearance of Collocation

Figure 1 – Data collecting procedure

Figure 2 – Data analyzing procedure

Figure 3 – Frequency of occurrence of lexical cohesive devices in BE texts Figure 4 – Frequency of appearance of repetition’s sub-types

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1 Title of the paper

A study on lexical cohesive devices in the texts from ESP course book

“English for Economics” by Assoc Prof Nguyễn Xuân Thơm, PhD, and pedagogical implications for teaching ESP to third year students at FELTE, ULIS, VNU.

2 Rationale of the study

Over the past two decades, it can be obviously seen that the teaching andlearning English, especially English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have changeddramatically In the 1990s, ESP was taught in some selected universities, but now,

it becomes a compulsory subject in almost every universities and colleges thatfollow the curriculum established by the Ministry of Education and Training(MOET) This course provides students with background knowledge andvocabulary of specialist fields, therefore it helps them greatly in their future careers.Being aware of the major role of ESP, the researcher found an urge to improve theteaching and learning of ESP for students at FELTE, University of Languages andInternational Studies However, there remain some difficulties as follows:

ESP is taught to Economics English students in their second year and toother FELTE students in their third year, accounting for only 45 credit hours Inother words, two-thirds of the students whose majors are not Economic English,have only one semester to learn ESP Within that limited time, those students canhardly learn much knowledge of ESP Most non-Economic English students reachtheir advance level of English by the end of their third year, so reading economictexts is not a problem However, in order to understand and remember all the termsand economic issues, it requires a longer period of time than 45 credit hours Thereare complaints from the students about the difficulties they encounter whilelearning reading passages in BE It may derive from students’ lack of interest Formost of them, since economics is not their major, the students have not found itnecessary and interesting to learn Moreover, the main activity in ESP class is

translating for three hours; therefore, learning ESP possibly turns out to privatetalking and disorder in class.

The above reasons have induced the researcher to conduct a research onreading section, as it is the main part of every unit in EFE course book As alanguage learner who has taken ESP course in the third year, the researcher has adesire to improve both the teaching and learning EPS from an internal linguisticperspective, rather than the external skill-practicing one As a result, the researcherdecide to make an investigation into cohesive devices used in the texts of BEcourse book, especially lexical devices in hopes that it would help students as well

as teachers more in understanding the reading texts and learning vocabulary

3 Scope of the study

Within the framework of a graduation paper, the study mainly focus onlexical cohesive devices, the frequency of occurrence of these devices in some texts

in BE course book The study investigates how often these lexical cohesive devicesappear, and how they affect the text comprehending and vocabulary learning Afterexamining and analyzing the collected data, some pedagogical implications aredrawn for both teachers and students of BE

4 Objectives of the study

The paper aims at briefly reviewing theories in related concepts including:

discourse, text, coherence and cohesion, and cohesive device; and investigating

how the lexical cohesive ties are used in the chosen economic texts of the coursebook EFE The research particularly attempts to answer the above mentionedresearch questions

 What lexical cohesive devices are used most frequently in the economic texts of course book “English for Economics” (EFE)?

 What are the overall features of BE discourses in terms of lexical cohesion?

6 Methods of the study

6.1 Data collection instrument

With the purpose of pointing out lexical cohesive devices in ten choseneconomic texts, document observation is used to collect data

6.2 Data collection procedure

Figure 1: Data collecting procedure 6.3 Data analysis method

In this paper, the author uses descriptive analysis and statistic researchmethods to achieve the research objectives The data used for data analysis arecollected from five texts chosen in EFE course book The author then identifies andcalculates all the lexical cohesive items of each type of lexical cohesion as well asits subtypes that occur in the chosen texts The data collected are then comparedwithin a text or among the categories and according to the analytical purposes usingcomparative method and contrastive analysis

7 Significance of the study

This paper is classified as a primary research; therefore can be used as thefoundation for the author’s further studies or reference for any research in the samefield Also, the recognition of lexical cohesive devices in the Business English (BE)course book can bring future pedagogical conclusion to ESP teachers on how to

Step 1:

Five texts are

chosen from the

EFE course book

Step 2:

All lexical cohesivedevices in the textsare investigated

Step 3:

All lexical cohesivedevices arecategorized

PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, review on other studies in related field is examined to investigate any possible gaps In addition, several terms and notions about discourse and discourse analysis are explained to get a general view on the subject matter

1 Discourse and discourse analysis

1.1 Discourse

The definition of discourse is shared among several famous linguists David

Nunan (1995) said that discourse was “a stretch of language consisting of several sentences which are perceived as being related in some way” A similar perspective was given before that in 1992 by Crystal when he defined discourse as “a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument or narrative”.

Hoa, N (2004) shares a similar viewpoint in which discourse is defined as “a combination of sentences (or utterances) used to get our message across” Nguyen

also provides a more explicit explanation that discourse carries its own meaningand is more than the whole meaning of its components

1.2 Discourse and text

The difference between discourse and text has long been discussed, but stillthere are two trends going on among linguists towards these terms

On one side, discourse and text are distinguished According to Cook (1989,cited in Nunan, 1993), discourse and text are two different categories The former is

a meaningful, unified and purposive stretch of language, whereas the latter is theone being interpreted formally without context Though Nunan (1993) puts bothdiscourse and text around the core of a communicative event, he still separatesthem as text referring to any written record and discourse being the interpretation incontext

On the other hand, text and discourse are considered to refer to the samesubject matter and may replace each other Halliday and Hasan (1976) provide themost appropriate definition of ‘text’ They consider a text as written or spokenstretches of the text, i.e., a text is the stretch of written or spoken language whichproposes that language follows a linear sequence where one line of text followsanother with each line being linked to the previous line This linear progression oftext creates a context of meaning Contextual meaning at the paragraph level isreferred to as coherence while their internal properties of meaning are referred to ascohesion The following definition by Halliday and Hasan (1976) determines themain factors that constitute a text:

“A text is a unit of language in use It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence; and it is not defined by its size A text is sometimes envisaged to be some kind of super sentence, a grammatical unit that is larger than a sentence but is related to a sentence in the same way that a sentence is related to a clause, a clause to a group and so on: by constituency, the composition of larger units out of smaller ones But this is misleading A text is not something that like a sentence, only bigger; it is something that differs from a sentence in kind […] A text does not consist of sentences, it is realized by, or encoded in, sentences.”

(Halliday and Hasan, 1976:1-2)

For further analysis, it is noteworthy that texts exist in both written andspoken language In the former, it is produced by the writers with letters, whereas

in the latter, it only becomes language in use if it is recorded, i.e., it will creatediscourse Thus, text is a linguistic product of discourse that can be studied withoutreference to its contextual elements as an evidence of linguistic rules However,what is important is that text can only include some factors from the contexts whichare relevant to its interpretation A text is not just a sequence of sentences strungtogether, but a sequence of units that can be sentences or parts of sentences, and are

connected in some contextually appropriate ways “A text as a whole must exhibit the related, but distinguishable properties of cohesion and coherence.” (Lyon,

1983:198, cited in Azzouz 2009) Thus cohesion is concerned with formalconnectedness Moreover, according to McCarthy (2001), it is necessary to havethe contribution of schemas’ activation to form a text because the interactionbetween the readers’ perspective and the text can be seen through the relationbetween sentences and the way a coherent text is created by combining units ofmeaning Thus, text and discourse are interchangeable, focusing on language

“beyond the sentence”, i.e., to take context as part of any utterances or sentences

Hence, for the purpose of this study, the researcher would like to take the

second viewpoint about text and discourse as the base Thus, the words text and discourse are treated interchangeably.

1.3 Spoken and written discourse

Although spoken and written discourse share some similar features; for

example, they are used “to get things done, to provide information and to entertain” (Nunan, 1993:8), discourse analysts have made a clear distinction

between written and spoken discourse, and gradually they have become aware ofthe need to study each type separately

David Nunan (1993) makes distinction between spoken and writtendiscourse based on three categories: grammar, lexical density and situation

Spoken language involves some problems which are absent in writtendiscourse, such as a degree of spontaneity when producing speech Spokenlanguage can be adjusted according to the interlocutor by the use of some availableinternational features The speaker can ensure the comprehensibility by modifyingutterances in communicative situations, where the interlocutor shows a sign ofcomprehension (Brown and Yule, 1983) Meanwhile, in written discourse, thewriter has the rights to modify some written language where necessary, as well asthe ability to check up words in the dictionary where needed

“Lexical density is a characteristic difference between spoken and written discourse Written discourse displays a much higher ratio of lexical (content)

words […] to total running words.” (Hoang, 2006:24, cited in Pham 2012), so

written discourse seems to deliver more information

According to Nunan (1993), the difference between spoken and writtendiscourse lies in the context, i.e., the situation to what, how and when the text isperformed For example, the written text is used to communicate with people whoare not in the same setting, or for those occasions on which a record is required

In the scope of this paper which analyzes the lexical cohesion in writtendiscourse of BE, the researcher only takes into account the features of writtendiscourse

1.4 Discourse analysis

Linguists had long been concerned with the analysis of single sentenceswhere the focus was on morphology and phonology area The attention was thenshifted to the sentence level by the advent of Chomsky’s transformationalGenerative Grammar in 1957 However, Coulthard (1977) criticizes that theanalysis is not really adequate because it still focuses on the formal properties oflanguage rather than achieving meaning Linguists have become aware of the use ofcontext and language function (Cook, 1989) This awareness came with Harris’spaper published with the title “Discourse Analysis” in 1952 Later in the 1960s andthe 1970s, there were several studies of language in context, namely the work ofAustin (1962), Hymes (1964), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Grice (1975), M A K.Halliday (1973), Sinclair and Coulthard (1977),Van Dijk (1972) and many others

McCarthy (1991) states that “Discourse analysis has grown into a wide ranging and heterogeneous discipline which finds its unity in the description of language above the sentence and an interest in the contexts and cultural influences which effect language in use.”

Discourse is related to many disciplines such as: semiotics, sociology,

psychology, etc Brown and Yule (1983) claim that “the term discourse analysis has come to be used with a range of meanings which cover a wide range of

activities at the intersection of many disciplines from sociolinguistics, philosophical linguistics to computational linguistics.”

The principle concern of discourse analysis is to examine how any languageproduced by a given participant whether spoken or written is used incommunication for a given situation in a given setting Thus, discourse analysis is

concerned with written and spoken forms According to Hoa (2000), “discourse analysis is a study of how and for what purposes language is used in a certain context of situation and the linguistic means to carry out these purposes” He

claims that the speakers or writers are always at the main stage of communicationwhere they commence topics, set up presuppositions, define information structuresand create inference; meanwhile, the hearers or readers interpret and draw

inferences He concludes that “this is essentially what makes communication a way process by means of language.”

Therefore, context is the environment in which a discourse occurs, whichrefers to both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects In order to make a successfulcommunicative event, listeners or readers have to understand the context of thediscourse

2 Cohesion and coherence

These two concepts of discourse – cohesion and coherence are consideredinterrelated Cohesion can be seen as a way to indicate coherence, but should not beidentified with coherence and assumed that there is a one-to-one correspondencebetween them (Hoa, N 2000)

2.1 Cohesion

Cohesion plays an important role in the comprehension of written discourse,because readers depend on the cohesion and coherence of texts to comprehend.Cohesion locates within a text and is different from coherence which is establishedwithin the reader during the process of reading Since cohesion creates semanticcontinuity, it allows coherence and comprehensibility

Tanskanen (1984) referred cohesion to “the grammatical and lexical elements on the surface of a text which can form connections between parts of the text.” While Halliday and Hasan (1976) claimed that “the concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations and meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text.”

To illustrate, we can take an example: a cooking instruction says “Wash and

core six cooking apples Put them in a fire proof dish” the item “them” in the

second sentence refers back to “six cooking apples” in the first sentence In this

case, we would not understand the second sentence without referring back to the

first one which gives signal to what “them” stands for This means, “them” is an

item to which it facilitates the readers’ understanding of the relation betweensentences in a text

2.2 Coherence

Once again, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), “coherence is the underlying organizer which makes the words and sentences into a unified discourse that conforms to a consistent world picture Coherent text is meaningful, unified and gives the impression of ‘hanging together”.”

In grammar, ungrammatical sentences are those that do not fit together in asensible way, either with or without mistakes in individual sentences They arecalled incoherence in text and discourse analysis, which leads to a key issue offinding what makes some texts hang together while others are incoherent.

3 Cohesive devices

3.1 Cohesive devices

A coherent text is the one with grammatical sentences and/or containingcertain words and expressions that connect the sentences together Such linkingwords and expressions are called cohesive devices, which keep different parts of atext together

In terms of usage, cohesive devices help us distinguish new informationfrom the old information When reading a text without cohesive devices, readerswould have an impression of reading all new and irrelevant information, though wecan still depend on our background knowledge or clues from the text to organizethe information without the help of cohesive devices A text is still consideredcoherent if it has grammatical sentences, though the writer or speaker does not usecohesive devices In contrast, a text with only cohesive devices and no grammaticalsentences can confuse readers or hearers, and so the text becomes incoherent Thismeans a communication discourse must be coherent but not necessarily cohesive

3.2 Classification

Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify the five types of cohesion: referencecohesion, substitution cohesion, ellipsis cohesion, conjunctive cohesion, and lexicalcohesion The first four types belong to the categories of grammatical cohesion.Lexical cohesion, on the other hand, refers to the relations between any lexicalitems and previously occurring items in the text, which is independent from thegrammatical category The five types are further explained below

3.2.1 Referential cohesion

Thompson (1996) gave an explicit explanation of reference when he wrote

“reference is the set of grammatical resources which allow the speaker to indicate

whether something is repeated from somewhere else in the text or whether it has not yet appeared in the text.”

Reference is divided into two types, which are anaphoric reference andcataphoric reference Anaphoric reference draws the readers or listeners backwards

to the previously mentioned entity, while cataphoric reference draws the readers orlisteners forward to identify the elements to which the reference items refer (Nunan1993)

3.2.2 Substitution cohesion

Substitution is “the replacement of one item by another” which is “a relation between linguistic items, such as words or phrases…, a relation on the lexico-grammatical level” (Halliday and Hasan 1976:89).

Substitution cohesion contains sense identity relation, not the referenceidentity relation It has three subdivisions namely clausal substitution, verbalsubstitution, and nominal substitution

3.2.3 Elliptical cohesion

The absence of a word, a phrase or a clause in a sentence whose meaning isstill understood is called elliptical cohesion Like substitution cohesion, ellipticalcohesion also consists of clausal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, and nominal ellipsis

3.2.4 Conjunctive cohesion

Look at the following example

E.g She brushed her teeth before she went to bed.

The word “before” suggests a sequence, signaling that what is expressed inthe second clause follows what is expressed in the first clause

Halliday and Hasan (1976) pointed out that “conjunctive elements are cohesive not in themselves but indirectly, by virtue of their specific meanings; they are not primarily devices for reaching out into the preceding or following text, but they express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components

in the discourse.”

Conjunctive cohesion can be seen in four ways: additive (similarly, likewise,

in the same way, and, or…); adversative (although, though, despite, however,nevertheless…); causal (hence, then, so, because, therefore…) and temporal (then,next, after that, at last…)

3.2.5 Lexical cohesion

Lexical cohesion is the last type of cohesion according to the classification

of Halliday and Hasan (1976) Unlike the rest four types which are associated withsyntactic elements, lexical cohesion has nothing to do with syntactic relations Forthis reason, lexical cohesion is the most difficult type to define since it isvocabulary-driven and based on lexical relations It is divided into two maincategories: reiteration and collocation, which are further explained below

3.2.5.1 Reiteration

Reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which comprises of the repetition of

a lexical item to refer back to a lexical item and number of things in between as theuse of synonyms, near-synonyms, antonym or superordinate (Halliday and Hasan,1976)

3.2.5.2 Collocation

According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 8th, collocation is agroup of words in a language that happens very often and more frequently thanwould happen by chance Another explicit explanation is that collocation is a group

of words whose meaning relates to the same certain contents (e.g car, gas, driver)(Pham 2012)

Within the scope of the study, the researcher focuses on the two sub-types oflexical cohesion which are reiteration (repetition, synonym, antonym, andsuperordinate) and collocation

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, the research methodology is carefully analyzed, including: research design, the setting of the study, participants Besides, data collecting instruments and procedure are put into consideration as well, and same for data analysis methods.

1 Research design

In this particular study, the researcher decides to use a combination of bothqualitative research and quantitative research Scollon (2001) stated that criticaldiscourse analysis is a form of qualitative research, and so qualitative research isused as the main research method in this study The researcher provides careful anddetailed descriptions of data, and works intensively with only some of the textschosen However, as to support the purpose of the study and to answer the researchquestions, the number of lexical cohesive devices appearing in the texts iscalculated to measure its frequencies

As shown in the book Second Language Research - Methodology and Design (Mackey, A & Gass, S M 2005), quantitative research generally starts with

an experimental design in which a hypothesis is followed by the quantification ofdata and some sort of numerical analysis is carried out Qualitative studies, on theother hand, generally are not set up as experiments; the data cannot be easilyquantified, and the analysis is interpretive rather than statistical

2 Setting of the study

ESP has become one of the compulsory courses for fast-track students atFELTE; however it is not among the main subjects, so it has a translation approach.The EFE course book is designed for students to translate economic texts betweenVietnamese and English, and vice versa Through the translation work, the studentsalso learn new words, terminologies, and new knowledge about economics

3 Participants

Within the scope of this study, five texts from the EFE course book areselected for analysis, which are:

Table 1: List of texts analyzed in the study

The above five texts are extracted from five units of the course book EFEwhich is used for third year students at ULIS in their ESP course Most of the units

in the course book have three main parts:

1 An informative reading text giving general ideas and key points ofrelated topic;

2 Exercises that can be either listening or reading practice;

3 Two reading passages, one in Vietnamese and one in English, fortranslation practice

The five texts are five English reading passages taken from the third part ofthe unit They provide further examples and analyze deeper in the economic issuesbeing discussed, including a large amount of relevant economic terms

4 Data collecting instruments

4.1 Observation of documents

Observation usually refers to “methods of generating data which involved the researcher immersing in a research setting, and systematically observing dimensions of that setting, interactions, relationships, actions, events and so on,

within it” (Mason, 1996) The researcher aims at providing careful description of

the texts, and listing all lexical cohesive devices through some combinations ofnotes

Observation of documents is used to gain understanding of lexical cohesivedevices in the texts Documents used in this study are the written, physical texts inthe course book

5 Data analyzing procedure

Figure 2: Data analyzing procedure

6 Data analysis methods

6.1 Content analysis

Content analysis starts off as a method for analyzing messages in the media,but more recently, it has been applied more widely to almost any form ofcommunication, involving materials such as essays, and in this case, texts

In this study, the researcher reads and analyzes the five chosen texts to findall lexical items

6.2 Statistical analysis

In this study, the lexical cohesive devices are listed, counted, andcategorized in groups depending on their characteristics Mean, mode, and medianare often used to carry out the above process

In this study, after analyzing texts and listing out all lexical items, theresearcher counts the number of items and categorizes them in groups according tothe framework Mode and median are not used in the calculation process howeverthe percentage of each lexical types and sub-types are applied to see the trend andfrequency of lexical devices

CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In this chapter, the lexical cohesive devices used in five different texts are analyzed Statistics description is used to demonstrate the results.

1 An overview of the study

According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), in order to make texts hangtogether experientially lexical cohesion is used as the central device Hasan (1984)and Hoey (1991) both agreed that forty to fifty percent of a text’s cohesive ties arelexical, which proves the importance of this type of cohesion

This paper adopts the taxonomies provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976) asmentioned in the previous part, in which lexical cohesion is divided into two maintypes: reiteration and collocation Reiteration is sub-classified into four sub-types:repetition, synonym, antonym, and superordinate

The occurrence of lexical cohesive ties found in the five BE texts ispresented in the following table:

Table 2: Number of lexical cohesive devices in sample texts

lexical items identified in BE reading texts of which 200 are repetitions, accounting

for 41.6% Superordinate has a count of 102, equivalent to 21.2% Next iscollocation device with the occurrence of 74 times, accounts for 15.4%, followed

with 43 items counted equal to 8.9% The following figure shows the difference inthe contribution of lexical cohesive ties in the sample texts

Figure 3: Frequency of occurrence of lexical cohesive devices in BE texts

2 Analysis of lexical cohesive devices in BE reading texts

2.1 Reiteration

Reiteration is termed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) and explained as "therepetition of a lexical item, or the occurrence of a synonym of some kind, in thecontext of reference; that is, where the two occurrences have the same referent.Typically, therefore, a reiterated lexical item is accompanied by a referent item

usually 'the' or a demonstrative" (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 319) The role of a

referent is claimed to be absolutely important in creating the cohesive force indiscourses Obviously, a reiterated item followed by a referent item is thereforecohesive by reference as in the following example:

There is a boy climbing that tree

The boy's going to fall if he doesn't take care (repetition)

The lad's going to fall if he doesn't take care (synonym)

The child's going to fall if he doesn't take care (superordinate)

2.1.1 Repetition

Repetition refers to the same lexical item with the same meaning occurringmore than once in the same discourse Repetition is categorized by Hoey (1991)into simple repetition and complex repetition

Perhaps the biggest challenge now facing the international advertising

industry is that of establishing “world brands” by appealing to the global consumer in all of us For whiles there will always be national and niche markets which require specific marketing strategies, global operations call for global campaigns, Professor Theodore Levitt of Harvard Business

School first put forward the theory of “the globalization of markets” But the idea that there are more similarities between cultures than differences

goes back to the popular image of the “global village”

In the above example, the adjective global is repeated exactly with its

grammatical function, it is, therefore, considered simple repetition

One way of making a discourse coherent is repeating important words whichare used more than once in the same discourse In all the sample texts investigated

in this thesis, most of the topic words occur repeatedly For example, in text 3

“Entrepreneurs”, the topic word entrepreneurs is repeated seven times In text 4

“If the price is right”, the word price is used repeatedly 11 times, whereas the word diamond is repeated up to 13 times in text 2 with the topic “Diamonds are forever” The followings are some typical examples taken from the sample texts:

Example in text 2:

The high price of diamond is a triumph of the commercial clout and

marketing genius of De Beers, the South African conglomerate that has 80

and distribution of diamonds, De Beers has managed to keep price artificially high And by turning the diamond into a universal symbol of romance it has prevented secondhand diamonds from flooding the market

and forcing prices down Even in times of hardship, people are reluctant to

part with their diamonds De Beers knows that if they ever did part with

them, the market would be saturated overnight.

Text 2 is about diamonds and how its high price can be kept for a long time

The word diamond can be found in almost every paragraph in the text This helps create a high cohesiveness of the text Meanwhile, text 4 deals with price and so the word price is used repeatedly

Complex repetition, as Hoey (1991) defined, is when two lexical items share

a lexical morpheme but are not entirely identical or when they are identical but theyhave different grammatical functions Therefore, it can be inferred that all thelexical items repeated in different parts of speech in a discourse can be seen as thecase of complex repetition For example:

tax (v) - tax (n) - taxable (adj)

liquid (adj) - liquidation (n)

Example in text 3:

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes – the dynamic, the cautious

and the greedy But all of them hold an equal fascination for us How do they do it? What’s their secret? Some of the world’s biggest corporations

would like to know too, for entrepreneurism is in and these days everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.

But an entrepreneur is not what you are, it’s what you become, and real

entrepreneurs exist only in retrospect At first, nobody takes them seriously.

They are crackpots, dreamers, unemployables And by the time they’ve finally earned the respect of the business community, they’ve already made

it So cancel the classes on entrepreneurship and throw out your business plan For the road to entrepreneurial success can’t be mapped out in

advance You get there one sale at a time.

As can be seen clearly from the example, the word entrepreneur as a noun

indicating a human is simply repeated three times However, the writer varified the

use of this word by using complex repetition The noun entrepreneur is now used

as the noun entrepreneurism and entrepreneurship, and the adjective entrepreneurial

The frequency of occurrence of sub-categories of repetition is presented inthe following chart:

Figure 4: Frequency of appearance of repetition’s sub-types

As shown in figure 2 simple repetition is dominantly used in BE texts Thenumber of calculated items is 165, accounting for 82.5%, while lexical itemsrelated to complex repetition is only 35, which takes merely 17.5%

As shown in table 3, repetition device appears in all the five texts with theprevalent occurrence in comparison with other lexical cohesive devices Inparticular, repetition accounts for more than 40% of the total cohesive devices used

in sample text 2, text 3, text 4 and text 5 In text 2, there are 43 simple repetitionitems, accounting for 37.4% of the total repetition items whereas complex repeateditems are 6, equivalent to 5.2% Among 35 repeated items in text 3, 36.1% issimple repetition and only 6.1% is complex repetition Text 4 has 50 repeated items

in total, which is equal to 44.6% with 39.3% of which is simple repetition and 5.3%complex repetition Repetition also appears with high frequency in the text 5compared with other cohesive devices, with 26 simple repetition accounting for32.1% and seven complex repetition contributing 8.6% of the total 40.7% repetitionitems Text 1 has 33 repeated items equal to 36.7% of all repetition cohesive ties ofwhich simple repetition accounts for 24.4% and complex repetition accounts for12.3%

The result of the study also reveals that the most common cases of simplerepetition found in sample texts are nouns and noun phrases Apart from these, verband adjective repetition also contribute a part in making the text coherent

Hoang (2006) referred synonymy to "the relation between different words bearing the same meaning or nearly the same meaning for a particular person, object, process or quality" With this definition, he does not distinguish the two

kinds of synonym but considers them as having identical meaning or similarmeaning The followings are some more examples taken from the sample texts:

but non-tradables have to be consumed where they are produced And since

a refreshing café noir halfway up the Eiffel Tower can only be purchased in Paris, frankly they can charge what they like for it But tradable or not, as

every salesperson knows, “the price of a thing is what it will bring.” And when it comes to price, they buyer is his own worst enemy Show me a high price and I’ll show you too many customers prepared to pay over the odds.

Example in text 5:

… And the result is that tens of thousands of managers are losing their

jobs in the name of re-inventing the corporation In fact, some say that, if

BPR really caught on, 25 million Americans would be made redundant tomorrow Of course, it’s not called redundancy these days, it’s called

down-sizing But it means the same thing to an out-of-world executive.

… According to Tom Peters, a management guru who’s clearly more

excited about BPR than the 25 million looking at impending unemployment

what a lot of large companies are learning that they can do better with four layers of management than with twelve.

In the first example, the three verbs buy, consume, and purchase share the exact same meaning of the act of getting goods The words cost and charge, though

have different usage, have the same definition ad are used intentionally to vary theuse of vocabulary

Similarly, in example two, all of the words in bold share the similar meaning

of having no jobs, though they do not always have a precisely identical meaning,but they are used to give further explanation They are all considered near-synonyms

Obviously synonymy is also used to make a text coherent Nevertheless, in

BE texts they occur with low frequency The researcher therefore does not split upthe two sub-categories of synonymy Instead, synonyms and near synonyms aretreated as one category, that is synonyms

Of all the cohesive devices, 62 synonyms are counted towards 481 relatedlexical items, taking up 12.9% of all The following table shows the details of howoften synonyms appear in BE texts From text 1 to text 5, there are respectively 18,

12, 6, 8, 18 synonyms The percentages of synonyms in each text are shown as inthe following table:

Table 4: Frequency of appearance of Synonym

Apart from repetition, synonymy is another cohesive device that makes thetext coherent However, it is not used as often as repetition device This is supposedthat repetition makes the words easy to recognize and recall Hence, readersconcentrate more on the topic of the text thanks to the repeated appearances ofwords While repetition is used to emphasize, synonymy is an effective way toexpress meanings differently

The majority of synonyms found in the five BE texts are nouns and verbs

This can be explained that texts in the course book EFE focus on giving business

and economic concepts and introducing key economic terms As a result, nouns andverbs are used synonymously to help create clarity, precision and unambiguity of atext

2.1.3 Antonymy

Antonyms are words of opposite meanings which have the same parts ofspeech It is used to make compare and contrast in a text Sometimes, a contrastbetween two words can be expected Hoang (2006) divides it into four sub-categories, such as contrary, complementary and relational opposites and orderedseries

Contrary relation refers to those pairs of opposites that are gradable such as

big - small, old - young, thick - thin

Complementary relation involves pair of opposites in which the denial ofone item implies the assertion of the other, and vice versa Examples of

complementary antonyms are: lose-win, live - die, high - low

Relational opposite is a special sub-category of antonym as an antonymouspair does not constitute a positive-negative opposition, however it refers to thecontrary relationship between two entities In other words, two opposite words are

mutually dependent and coexistent (Van, 2006: 82) Pairs of words like: doctor patient; boss - employee; increase - reduce; purchase - sell are considered

-relational antonyms

The last sub-type of antonymy is ordered series, that is, each item in theseries is against the others, but there are more than two opposites and each item isarranged in rank or in order As a result, they are non-gradable For example,

Friday - Sunday, spring - summer - autumn - winter

There are totally 43 antonyms found in all the investigated texts, accountingfor 8.9% of the entire related items Particularly, when examining carefully thetexts, no complementary opposite is found Therefore, only the other three sub-types of antonymy, contrary, relational and ordered series opposites are taken intoaccount Although antonyms appear with the lowest frequency in BE textscompared with other cohesive devices, the role of it in making the text cohesiveand coherent is undeniable

In all sample BE texts, antonyms appear with relatively small rates Fromtext 1 to text 5 there are respectively 6, 13, 8, 8 and 9 related items equal to thepercentages as shown in the following table:

Table 5: The frequency of occurrence of Antonyms

The following table presents the contribution of the sub-types of antonymy

to the cohesion of the text

Table 6: Frequency of occurrence of antonym’s sub-types

antonyms

Relational antonyms

Ordered series antonyms