A Survey of Syntactic Structures and Cohesive Devices Used by L2 EAP Writers with Pedagogical Implications to Reach a Standard Acceptable for Academic Audiences (Readers)

Szilagyi, M. (2020) A Survey of Syntactic Structures and Cohesive Devices Used by L2 EAP Writers with Pedagogical Implications to Reach a Standard Acceptable for Academic Audiences (Readers). Anybody Out There: Addressing Audiences in Academic Discourse EAP Conference, St Andrews, UK, 29 Feb 2020.

Abstract

As an EAP teacher I have observed that many second language (L2) students at UK universities have varying degrees of difficulty with writing academic texts in English. I felt they often possess an inadequate knowledge of syntactic and cohesive devices related to sentence and paragraph construction. In support of this, research has indicated that L2 students may have difficulty with certain syntactic constructions, such as relative clauses (Nakmori, 2002; Kiss-Gyulás, 2004), use simpler syntactic constructions compared to their first language (L1) counterparts (Hinkel, 2003), and their writing is more akin to spoken than written English register (Shaw & Liu, 1998). It was also found that many L2 students also have difficulties with aspects of textual cohesion; in particular the devices that link sentences together into a coherent and logical text (Zamel, 1983; Kuo, 1995). My presentation will focus on the extent that L2 novice writers are able to create syntactic structures and use cohesive devices to address academic audiences. In order to do this I will discuss my current research in which I am analysing such features within the texts of Year Round Pre-Sessional (YRPS) students who are at the early stages of their course at the University of Glasgow. These results will be compared to those of a group of L2 scientific PhD students whose work I analysed and compared to published texts and L1 writers for my Master’s thesis in 2009. The reason for this comparison is because my overall conclusion was that the PhD students would have required further syntactic and cohesive instruction to reach academic audiences.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Keywords: Syntactic strutures, cohesive devices, discourse analysis.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Szilagyi, Mr Marcus
• Authors: Szilagyi, M.
• Subjects: L Education > L Education (General); P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2020 The Author
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced with the permission of the author