REITERATION RELATIONS IN EFL STUDENT ACADEMIC WRITING AND THE EFFECTS OF ONLINE LEARNING
Vol.10,No.1(2017)
Lexical cohesion significantly contributes to a text’s thematic progression, and by means
of it to perceived coherence. Therefore, the ability to express lexical cohesive relations
represents one of the areas of learners’ inter-language that are to be developed in foreign
language instruction. The paper reports on the development of lexical cohesion (namely
the class of reiteration) in EFL undergraduate and postgraduate academic writing as a
result of participation in a purely online academic writing course involving no face-toface
interaction. The course was delivered at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
To determine the effect of the treatment, a quasi-experimental one-group pre-test post-test
design was followed, with the genre of argumentative essay assigned for both measures.
The pre/post-test analysis comprised two stages: the identification and classification
of reiteration pairs based on Tanskanen’s framework (2006) followed by subsequent
evaluation of each pair in terms of its appropriateness/correctness. Thus, every pair was
classified either as appropriate/well-formed or as displaying a sign of immature writing
with respect to given genre expectations. The occurrence of key lexical items forming
chains of cohesion was also monitored. After the treatment, the use of reiteration devices
in students’ compositions improved in several respects. A greater variety of reiteration
relations was observed, with a statistically significant decline in simple repetition and
corresponding increases in other categories of reiteration relations. In addition, the
pre/post-test comparison showed a statistically significant increase in the number of
reiteration pairs that were classified as appropriate/well-formed, and in the frequency of
key lexical items.
English as a foreign language; student academic writing; argumentative essay; lexical cohesion; reiteration; online learning; electronic feedback
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