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1. 1
A STUDY OF COHESION IN THIRD-YEAR COLLEGE STUDENTS' ESSAYS
HAWRAA JABBAR RAHI
Instructor/ Najaf
ASST. PROF. DR. ABBAS H. J. SULTAN
University of Kufa
Abstract. The present study is concerned with the concept of cohesion (or cohesive
devices) and connected with the relationship between the number of cohesive
devices used by students and the scores of students' essays. There are two main
types of cohesive devices; grammatical and lexical ones. Grammatical devices
include reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. Lexical devices include
reiteration and collocation. This study hypothesizes that grammatical devices are
more frequently used than lexical ones. Also, it is hypothesized that there is a
correlation between the number of cohesive devices used by students and scores
they attain in essay writing course. The hypothesis is verified through a descriptive
ork hi h fo uses o the stude ts essa s. The use of cohesive devices are
investigated in twenty essays produced by Iraqi undergraduate third-year college
students at the Faculty of Education, Department of English, University of Kufa in
Najaf governorate during the academic year 2013-2014 to see the problems that
face them in using cohesive devices appropriately. The results of the present study
indicate that students are able to use a variety of cohesive devices in their writing,
among which grammatical ones are the most recurrent, followed by lexical devices
which are relatively neglected by students. Finally, it concludes that scores are highly
affected by the number of cohesive devices used.
1. Introduction
1.1 Background to the Study
When a speaker hears or reads a passage which consists of more than one
sentence, he can easily identify whether it forms a unified whole or it is a mere
collection of sentences. The concept of cohesion cannot be separated from the
concept of text. Halliday and Hasan (1976:1) state that the word text can be used to
refer to "any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a
unified whole". The property of being a text is better expressed through the concept
of texture. What distinguishes a text from a group of unrelated sentences is texture.
Texture is a feature of text which make it a unified whole (ibid: 2).
Gramley and Pätzold (1992:183) state that text sentences are linked by
grammatical and lexical means which prompt readers to interpret them as belonging
together. Texture is achieved by cohesive relations which occur between the
constituents of the text whether phrases, sentences or paragraphs. The texture is
produced by cohesive relations. Relations like reference, substitution, ellipsis,
conjunctions and lexical chains are represented by linguistic markers. These markers,
i.e., cohesive devices in linguistics, create texture.

2. 2
1.2 Significant of the study
Writing in English as a foreign language is becoming more important owing to the
fact that even English language learners have to write papers and theses in English,
and also sending job application letters and economic activities on an international
scale have magnified the role of English language in international communications.
Cohesion is important both to the reader and the writer to create and comprehend a
text, so more attention should be paid to writing generally and to the role of
cohesive devices particularly.
1.3 Statement of the Problem
Halliday and Hasan (1976) emphasize the use of cohesive devices in order to
ensure texture or cohesion in writing. The effect of these linguistic devices on writing
is very strong since they provide us with various kinds of grammatical and lexical
devices which are used to stretch any piece of writing to be cohesive. It is
noteworthy that without having a good command of the linguistic ties, one can
never construct a cohesive text. Linguistic ties make the text more cohesive and
understandable. But it seems that students do not use the cohesive devices
efficiently and the problem noticed by teachers is that students have many problems
in writing effective text in general and in using cohesive devices in particular. Like
other types of discourse, essay must have texture. To create such a texture, of
course, there must be cohesive devices used in these essays. Thus, the present paper
aims at analyzing cohesive devices used in third-year college students' essays at the
Faculty of Education, Department of English, University of Kufa in Najaf governorate.
1.4 Statement of the Purpose
Cohesion has been tackled by many grammarians and linguists, but to the best of
my knowledge, no previous study has been carried out on third-year college
students' essays. The value of the research lies in studying cohesion and its types and
this will consequently help students not to neglect the use of cohesive devices in
their writing.
This study has the following aims:
1. To identify the types of cohesive devices in third-years college students'
essays,
2. To identify the most frequent cohesive devices in these essays,
3. To find out the reasons for the relative use of some cohesive devices,
4. To show the relationship between the number of cohesive devices used by
the students and the scores of students' essays finally,
5. To draw some conclusions, recommendations and suggestions based on the
results of the analysis.

3. 3
1.5 Research Questions
Adopti g Hallida a d Hasa s 19 ohesio theor as the fra e ork, this stud
seeks to identify the general cohesive features in writing composed by Iraqi
undergraduate university students at the Faculty of Education, Department of
English, University of Kufa in Najaf governorate. It aims to answer the following
questions:
1. Do the students use cohesive devices in their writing?
2. To what extent do the students use each category of cohesive devices?
3. Which types of cohesive devices are widely used and which are not.
4. Is there a relationship between the number of cohesive devices used by the
students and the scores of the same essays?
1.6 Limitation and Delimitation
The study is limited to investigate samples of third-year college students at the
Faculty of Education, Department of English, University of Kufa in Najaf governorate.
Limits are made to keep a fixed standard of subjects. In this way, results will be more
accurate and the researcher will be able to make conclusive detections. One
important point that should be mentioned here is that the researcher is not
i terested i the stude ts riti g a ilit , or the errors hi h the ight ake i
their writings. The concern of the study is on the number of cohesive devices which
the subjects might use in their writings, and on the relationship between the scores
of the students' essay and the number of cohesive devices used by them.
1.7 Hypothesis
The present study is hypothesized that grammatical cohesive devices are more
frequent than lexical ones. Also, it is hypothesized that there is a relationship
between the number of cohesive devices used by the students and the scores of the
same essays.
1.8 Organization of the Study
This paper is divided into five sections. Section one is an introduction of the
research. Section two presents a theoretical survey of cohesion and states its types.
Section three is devoted to the research methodology. Section four includes results
of the analysis. The final section presents the conclusions, recommendations, and
suggestions for further studies.

4. 4
2. Literature Review
2.1 The concept of Cohesion
Texts must have a certain structure which depends on factors completely
different from those of a single sentence. These factors are described in terms of
cohesion (Yule,2006: 143). Cohesion has many definitions. Tanskanen (2006:7) says
that "cohesion refers to the grammatical and lexical elements on the surface of a
text which can form connections between parts of the text". Verschueren (1999:104)
states that the label cohesion is generally used to designate the overt marking of
relations within a discourse or text. Gutwiniski (1976:26) mentions that the term
cohesion is used for "the relations obtaining among the sentences and clauses of a
text". Bex (1996:91) considers cohesion "as residing in the semantic and grammatical
properties of language" because it guides the ways in which units of text are to be
understood in relation to each other.
Widdowson (2007:45) states that "the identification of connections that are
linguistically signaled, like those between pronoun and a previous noun phrase,
enables us to recognize the cohesion of a text". Matthews (1997: 62) defines
cohesion as "the connection between successive sentences in texts, conversations
etc., in so far as it can be described in terms of specific syntactic units". Beaugrande
and Dressler (1981) note that the notion of cohesion includes all of the functions
which can be used to signal relations among surface elements. Also, Richards and
Schmidt (2010:94) describe cohesion as "the grammatical andor lexical relationships
between the different component parts of a text. Cohesion might exist within or
between sentences in a text". Cohesion is described by Baker (2011:190) as "the
network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which provide links between
various parts of a text". Lastly, McArthur (1992:230) defines cohesion by saying that
it is "the use of language forms to indicate semantic relations between elements in a
discourse". Thus, the working definition in the present study suggests that cohesion
is the use of linguistic means or linguistic devices to knit the unity of a text. The study
of cohesion, therefore, investigates and seeks to discover what makes the text hold
together cohesively, and describe what linguistic means, or cohesion sources, that a
language uses to constitute the unity in different types of discourse.
2.2 The Function of Cohesion
The major function of cohesion is text formation. As defined, text is a unified
whole of linguistic items. This unity of text as a semantic whole is source for the
concept of cohesion. The word "text" is used in linguistics to refer to any passage,
spoken or written, prose or verse, dialogue or monologue of whatever length, that
does form a unified whole. Text has been used to refer to the theoretical construct
that underlies discourse (van Dijk, 1977:3).

5. 5
It has been suggested that text is the record of discourse (Brown and Yule,
1983:26). Text can be anything from a single instance of proverb to a whole play,
from a minute cry of child for demanding link to an important discussion going on in
a meeting. The basic idea of a text is that it entails some meanings; it brings about
meaning due to some internal resources inherent in it. Thus text can be regarded as
a semantic unit or meaning making structure (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:1).
Cohesion is achieved by the use of explicit linguistic devices to signal relations
between sentences and parts of a text. Such devices "help readers to recognize how
texts are organized and how different parts are connected to each other functionally
and semantically" (Connor,1996:49).The aim is to help the reader to understand the
items referred to the ones replaced and even the items omitted. Harmer (2004:22)
explains that "we can use various grammatical devices to help the reader understand
what is being referred to at all times, even when words are left out or pronouns are
substituted for nouns".
The appropriate use of cohesive devices enables readers and listeners to capture
the connectedness between what precedes and what follows. This means that the
dependency of the linguistic elements on each other in a text constructs a semantic
unit. Thus, the function of cohesion is to relate one part of a text to another part of
the same text. Consequently, it lends continuity to the text. By providing this kind of
text continuity, cohesion enables the reader or listener to supply all the components
to their interpretation.
2.3 The Concept of Tie
Tie is a relation which is possible only when there are two members. Halliday and
Hasan (1989:73) show this relationship through the following figure:
Figure (1): The Concept of Tie (Halliday and Hasan,1989:73).
According to Halliday and Hasan (1989:73), text is a continuous spacious in which
individual message follow each other, then the items that function as the two ends
of tie, A and B, are specially separated from each other. A may be part of one
message and B part of another. But there is a link between the two depicted above
by the two-headed arrow. The Nature of this link is semantic; the two terms of any
tie are tied together through some meaning relation. Such semantic relations are the
basis for cohesion between the messages of a text.

6. 6
2.4 Types of Cohesive Devices
Cohesion in text does not depend on one kind of relations, rather a set of relations
that works together. This section (2.4) discusses both grammatical (reference,
substitution, ellipsis, and conjuncts) and lexical (reiteration and collocation) cohesive
devices.
2.4.1 Grammatical Cohesion
Lexical Cohesion
Grammatical
Cohesion
Reference
Substitution
Endophoric
(within text)
Exophoric
(outside text)
Anaphoric
(backward reference)
Cataphoric
(forward reference)
Nominal
‫ى‬
Verbal
Clausal
Ellipsis (Omission)
Adversative
Causal
Conjuncts
Temporal
Reiteration
Collocation
Cohesion
Additive
Figure (2):Types of Cohesive Devices (Bell, 1991:155) based on Halliday and Hasan (1976).

7. 7
3. Research Methodology
This section aims at testing the hypothesis of the research whether and to what
extent students use cohesive devices? It is also intended to find out which types of
cohesive devices are widely used and which are not, and whether there is a
relationship between the number of cohesive devices used by the students and the
scores of the same essays. For this purpose, a test was used as an instrument to
collect data. The analysis of the test was undertaken in the form of frequencies of
used devices.
3.1 Procedures
In the present study, the hypothesis is going to be verified through a descriptive
ork hi h fo uses o the stude ts essa s . It erifies hether stude ts are a are
in using cohesive devices to have a cohesive discourse. In this work, a group of third-
year college students were asked to write essays, and then a description of their
production was carried out to show to what extent they were able to use cohesive
devices appropriately.
200 participants were asked to write English descriptive or narrative paragraphs in
no more than one hundred words about one of the following topics: Sympathy, Free
will, Gravity, or Baghdad in a rainy day. Twenty essays were chosen randomly to
make the analysis as objective and valid as possible. The first step in the analysis of
data is to identify the cohesive devices in these essays. Great care was needed to
ensure that all cohesive devices were identified, and this was done by hand. The
second step was taken the form of frequencies and percentages of the used devices.
In order to show the relationship between the number of the used cohesive devices
and the scores of the students, Spear a s ‘a k orrelatio oeffi ie t was applied.
3.2 Participants
The subjects of the study were all third-year college students at the Faculty of
Education, Department of English, University of Kufa in Najaf governorate during the
academic year 2013-2014. The choice had fallen on these subjects because third-
year students may be accepted to have a homogenous level in English and be
capable of understanding what can make a given discourse cohesive in terms of
linguistic ties.
3.3 Data Collection
In this study, twenty essays written by third-year college students were
randomly selected. All participants were given the topics to write within the time set.
The participants were asked to write their essays on their own without discussing
with their frie ds. A test as gi e to olle t the data a out the stude ts use of
cohesive devices. The test given to the students was an essay writing task in which
the test takers were supposed to write an essay. The essays were supposed to have
cohesion ensured by the use of several cohesive devices types.

8. 8
3.4 Method of Analysis
I the a al sis of the data, Hallida a d Hasa s 19 ta o o for ohesi e
devices was followed. This section started with the analysis by considering the total
use of each cohesive device, the frequencies of the students' use, and the
percentage of each cohesive devices used by the students.
3.5 Analysis of Data
The data are analyzed in terms of four steps. First, they are analyzed according to the
total use of cohesi e de i es. Se o d, the are a al zed a ordi g to the lear ers
use of grammatical cohesive devices. Third, they are analyzed according to the
lear ers use of le i al ohesi e de i es. A d fourth, Spear a 's ‘a k-Order
Correlation coefficient was applied to show the relationship between the number of
the used cohesive devices and the scores of students.
.5. A al sis of lear ers’ total use of cohesive devices
This step is de oted to the e pla atio of lear ers produ tio of ohesi e
devices; i.e., it shows which of the cohesive devices are used and which are not.
Some explanation will be carried out in order to show why some cohesive devices
are widely used and others are not. In relation to the number and the percentage of
grammatical and lexical cohesive devices, the following results are tentatively
observed and presented in Table (1):
Types of cohesion Frequency Percent%
Grammatical cohesion 185 80.78%
Lexical Cohesion 44 19.21%
Total 229 100%
Table (1): Frequency of grammatical and lexical cohesion.
The frequency of cohesive relations in student's essays is 229 representing the total
number of the cohesive devices that are used by the third-year college students in
the essays. Grammatical cohesion makes a frequency of 185 representing 80.78% of
the total number whereas lexical cohesion occurs only 44 times representing 19.21%
of the total number of the cohesive devices .Figure (6) below illustrates the
percentages of grammatical and lexical cohesion.
Figure (3): The percentage of grammatical and lexical cohesion.
Lexical
Cohesion
80.78 %
Grammatica
l Cohesion
19.21%

9. 9
.5. A al sis of lear ers’ use of gra atical cohesive devices
There is a great deal of variation in the frequency of grammatical cohesive ties.
Some devices are highly recurrent like "reference" and "conjuncts". Others are not
so frequent like "substitution" and "ellipsis". The frequency and percentage of each
grammatical cohesive device are presented in Table (2).
Types of Grammatical Cohesion Frequency Percent%
Reference 113 61.08%
Substitution 6 3.24%
Ellipsis 5 2.70%
Conjuncts 61 32.97%
Total 185 100%
Table (2): Frequency of types of grammatical cohesion.
Grammatical Cohesion is represented by reference, substitution, ellipsis, and
conjuncts. The distribution of the different use of grammatical cohesive devices can
be illustrated in the following Figure (7).
Figure (4): The percentages of the types of grammatical cohesive devices.
Reference constitutes the majority of cohesive ties with 113 frequency of
occurrence constituting 61.08% of grammatical cohesive devices in the data. It can
be divided into three major types: personal, demonstrative and comparative. Table
(3) below shows the distribution of frequencies of reference forms and their
percentages:
Reference
Substitution
Ellipsis
Conjuncts

10. 10
Types of Reference Frequency Percent %
Personal 83 73.45%
Demonstrative 20 17.69%
Comparative 10 8.84%
Total 113 100%
Table (3): Frequency of Types of Reference.
It can be noticed that personal reference constitutes the highest frequency with
83 and 73.45% of the referential category. Demonstrative reference comes after
personal reference with 20 frequency and 17.69% of the total number of reference
forms. Comparative reference comes last constituting the frequency with 10 and
8.84% of referential cohesion.
Substitution and ellipsis help to avoid repetition and depend entirely on the
hearer's/reader's ability to retrieve the missing information from the surrounding co-
text. They are used when there is no doubt about what is substituted or elliptical. As
it can be seen from Table (1), substitution occurs 6 times and 3.24% of the total
number of grammatical cohesive devices in the data.
Ellipsis accounts for 5 frequency of occurrence and 2.70% of the total use of
grammatical cohesive devices. Substitutive and Ellipses devices do not have a
significant role in writing because both are characteristics of conversation. Table (3)
and (4) show the frequency and percentage of the types of substitution and ellipsis
respectively.
Types of Substitution Frequency Percent %
Nominal 2 33.33%
Verbal 1 16.66%
Clausal 3 50%
Total 6 100%
Table (4): Frequency of types of substitution.
Types of Ellipsis Frequency Percent %
Nominal 1 20%
Verbal 1 20%
Clausal 3 60%
Total 5 100%
Table (5): Frequency of types of ellipsis.

11. 11
Conjuncts represent 61 frequency of occurrence and 32.97 of the total use of
cohesive devices as it is illustrated in table (2). Table (5) below illustrates the
frequency and percentage of the types of conjuncts.
Conjuncts Frequency Percent %
Additive 25 40.98%
Adversative 8 13.11%
Causal 17 27.86%
Temporal 11 18.03%
Total 61 100%
Table (6): Frequency of Types of Conjuncts.
As in Table (5), additive conjuncts seems to constitute the highest frequency with
40.98% of the total number of conjuncts, causal conjuncts come after with 27.86%,
temporal conjuncts constitute 18.03% of the total use of conjuncts and adversative
conjuncts come last constituting 13.11% of the total use of conjuncts.
3.5.3 Analysis of lear ers’ use of le ical cohesive devices
Lexical cohesion is the central device for making texts hang together but it
comprises a frequency of only 44 and 19.21% of the total number of cohesive
devices. Table (5) below illustrates the frequency and percentage of the types of
lexical cohesion.
Types of Grammatical Cohesion Frequency Percent%
Reiteration 16 36.36%
Collocation 28 63.63%
Total 44 100%
Table (7): Frequency of types of lexical cohesion.
As noticed in Table (5), collocation constitutes the highest frequency with 28 and
63.63% of the total number of lexical cohesion whereas reiteration has 16 frequency
making up 36.36% of the total use of lexical cohesive devices. The percentages of
lexical cohesive devices can be illustrated in Figure (8).

12. 12
Figure (5): The percentages of lexical cohesive devices.
To show the relation between the number of cohesive devices used by the
students and the scores of students' essays, Spearman formula is applied:
d²
D
Y
X
Score of the
essays (Y)
Number of
cohesive devices
(X)
Sample
0.25
0.5
4.5
4
6
16
1
49
7
8
15
5
8
2
9
3
13.5
16.5
3
7
3
1
1
17
18
2
6
4
0.25
0.5
19.5
19
1
5
5
12.25
3.5
1.5
5
7
15
5
132.25
11.5
13.5
2
3
18
6
0.25
0.5
10.5
10
4
12
7
0.25
0.5
13.5
13
3
10
8
2.25
1.5
10.5
12
4
11
9
49
7
8
1
5
19
10
2.25
1.5
1.5
3
7
17
11
Reiteration
36.36%
Collocation
63.63%

13. 13
4
2
4.5
6.5
6
14
13
30.25
5.5
19.5
14
1
9
14
0.25
0.5
17
16.5
2
7
15
30.25
5.5
4.5
10
6
12
16
9
3
17
20
2
4
17
4
2
8
10
5
12
18
30.25
5.5
13.5
8
3
13
19
4
2
4.5
6.5
6
14
20
370
Total
Table (8):The percentage of grammatical and lexical cohesion according to Spearman's
Rank-Order Correlation.
4. Results of Analysis
The findings reveal that grammatical cohesion (80.78 %) constitutes the highest
percentage of the total number of cohesive devices used in third-year college
students' essays, followed by lexical cohesion (19.21%). Lexical cohesive devices are
relatively neglected by the students. This use is connected with the students' lack of
knowledge concerning lexical cohesive devices and the influence of their mother
language on the lexical knowledge. It appears that lexical cohesion is an area that
needs improvement for Iraqi college students specialized in English language.
Students demonstrated a limited choice in the use of lexical items and the majority
of the lexical devices were repetitiously used. The rare use of synonyms, antonyms,
superordinates, and collocation indicates that much needs to be done the teaching
vocabulary.
Analysis of the use of cohesive devices in essays shows that, among the four sub-
categories of grammatical cohesive devices, reference (61.08%) was the most
frequently used devices followed by conjunction (32.97%).To regard the use of
conjunctions, it seems that the students were capable of using a variety of devices to
bridge the previous sentence and the following one to make their writing clearer and
ore logi al. Ho e er, o l those o o l used ite s su h as a d , ut ,
ho e er also' ere the stude ts fa orites, hereas ite s su h as further ore ,
o the o trar , oreo er , i additio , o the hole , a d e ertheless seldom
occurred in their writing. Substitution and ellipsis are seldom used due to the fact
that substitutive and ellipses devices do not have a significant role in the writing
because both are characteristics of conversation. They constitute (3.24%) and
(2.70%) respectively.
A further statistical analysis shows that the essay scores were highly correlated
with the total number of cohesive devices used. This indicates that there is a
significant relationship between the number of cohesive devices used and the scores
of the writing created by these undergraduate university students.

14. 14
On the whole, Iraqi undergraduate third-year college students in general tend to
use more grammatical cohesive devices, reference and conjunction, followed by
lexical cohesive devices. Concerning the use of each category of cohesive devices,
they most probably have more difficulty in making effective use of these devices due
to low English proficiency and little training in writing. As a consequence, much
needs to be done in the teaching of writi g to e ha e the stude ts a are ess of
the importance and use of cohesive devices in their writing.
X = the place of marks of student's performance in grammatical cohesion.
Y= the place of marks of student's performance in the lexical cohesion.
D= X- Y
d)²
=
�²
The strength of sample depends on the following relations:
Lesser than 0.50 = positive weak
0.50 – 0.59 = positive accepted
0.60 – 69 = positive median
0.70 – 0.79 = positive strong
0.80 – 0.99 = positive very strong
1= positive equal
R=0.72 (positive strong relation)
This relation indicates a strong positive relationship between the number of
cohesive devices used by the students in the essays and the scores they obtained in
these essays. That is, the higher the students ranked in cohesive devices, the higher
they ranked in scores also, and vice versa.
To see if this R alue is sig ifi a t, a Spear a s ‘a k sig ifi a e ta le or graph is
used. To do this the degrees of freedom is needed to be calculated. The degree of
freedom is calculated by using the sum (n – 2) which is 18.

15. 15
The yellow line meets the red line at 0.1%. This means that there is a great
chance that the relationship between the number of cohesive devices used by
students and the scores of their essays is significant and not random. Thus, the null
hypothesis that there is no association between the number of cohesive devices used
by the students and the scores of the same essays must be rejected. In this case, data
indicates that there is a positive strong relationship between the number of cohesive
devices used by students and the scores of their essays. This means that the number
of cohesive devices used by students increases the scores of their essays.
5. Conclusions and Recommendations
5.1 Conclusions
The present study has been examined cohesive devices used in the essays of third-
year college students at the Faculty of Education, Department of English, University
of Kufa in Najaf governorate during the academic year 2013-2014. The results of the
current study come to state the following conclusions:
1. Cohesion is text forming component in the linguistic system. It links together the
elements that are structurally unrelated through the dependence of one on the
other for their interpretation. Without cohesion the semantic system cannot be
effectively activated at all.
2. Grammatical cohesive devices are the most extensively used ties in students'
essays. They constitute the major part of cohesive ties in all their essays.
2. Reference constitutes the major group of grammatical cohesive devices used by
students. It is the most frequent cohesive device used by students in their essays.
3. The prevailing type of referential items is personal pronouns, while demonstrative
pronouns are much fewer due to the fact that they are restricted in their
grammatical distribution because they refer back to the larger parts of the discourse.
Comparative reference comes last constituting the lowest percentage of referential
items used by the students.
4. The analysis also shows that substitution and ellipsis are nearly ignored in the
student's essays. It is also universally acknowledged that substitution and ellipsis
belong to the realm of conversation and dialogue. In order to avoid ambiguity,
confusion, and misunderstanding, low percentage of substitution and ellipsis is used
by the students.
5. Lexical cohesion differs from the other cohesive elements in text in that it is non-
grammatical. Lexical cohesion refers to the cohesive effect achieved by the selection
of vocabulary. It is possible to say that lexical cohesion covers any instance in which
the use of a lexical item recalls the sense of an earlier one. Lexical cohesive devices
are relatively neglected by the third-year college students. This use is connected by
the students' lack of knowledge concerning cohesive devices and the influence of
their mother language on the lexical knowledge.

16. 16
6. There is a strong positive relationship between the number of cohesive devices
used by students in their essays and the scores they attained in these essays. The
result of Spear a s ‘a k orrelatio oeffi ie t is 0.72 which is significant at the
level of significance. This means that the more the students use cohesive devices
appropriately in their essays, the more they attain scores in these essays.
7. Cohesion is also achieved by a variety of devices other than those which are
mentioned. These include, for instance, continuity of tense, consistency of style and
punctuation devices like colons and semi-colons which, like conjunctions indicate
how different parts of the text relate to each other.
8. The reason behind the unequal use of cohesive ties by students can be traced
back to the poor syntactic, morphological and semantic awareness, and inadequate
knowledge of cohesive rules. It is evident here that the students have not mastered
the use of all these ties.
9. The outcome of the study indicated that the ill-use of cohesive devices is caused
by poor linguistic competence, especially poor syntactic and semantic awareness,
and poor or inaccurate knowledge of the cohesion rules.
10. There is a number of factors lying behind these different cohesion problems. At
the psychological level, students face a number of challenges including lack of
motivation, lack of self-confidence, and writing anxiety.
11. The lectures on the essay writing course are scheduled to last for two hours a
week for each year at the faculty of education. It has been noted that the lecture
time is short, ranging from 40-50 minutes. So this can be one of the main reasons
behind the low proficiency in students' writing skills.
12. Native language may have a negative effect on students' use of cohesive devices.
That is why the students should learn the use of good sentence structures of English
language.
13. Furthermore, students are not used to read English books and this is likely to
impact on English writing because the more one reads, the better writing style and
vocabulary one develops.
14. In short, cohesion should be introduced to students to help them establish the
awareness of texture.

17. 17
5.2 Recommendations
The current study recommends that:
1. Curri ulu desig ers ust take i to o sideratio stude ts eeds a d i terests
in designing their curriculum, especially the study of cohesion to make the students
write their essays cohesively.
2. More emphasis should be laid on lexical cohesion because it is relatively neglected
by the students.
3. The teaching techniques adopted by Iraqi essay writing lecturers should be varied
to help meet the needs of students with different abilities.
4. Teaching and learning tasks should be graded and varied to help students to
improve their writing by using appropriate cohesive devices especially in large
classes of different abilities and skills.
5. Assessment used should be formative and summative. The formative assessment
should be regular, insightful and guiding. The summative assessment should work
according to a list of criteria and marked by two markers.
6. It is recommended that essay writing lecturers should be engaged in conducting
research in general and action resear h i parti ular here the a fi d stude ts
weakness areas and try to improve them. Action research is a form of investigation
designed to be used by teachers to attempt to solve problems and improve
professional practices in their own classrooms.
7. Emphasis should be laid on the reading of books such as novels or stories written
by native speakers of English where a demonstration of all these cohesive devices is
made in writing.

18. 18
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