The effect of the use of cohesive devices on students’ writing quality

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the writing performance of 3rd year EFL students at the Department of Letters and the English Language at the University of Constantine 01. It focuses on exploring how students use cohesive devices, namely the logical connectors, to examine the effect of such connectors on their writing quality. Through this work, it is attempted to diagnose the problematic issues for learners concerning the appropriate use of cohesive devices semantically and stylistically. The aim can be summarised as the following: a) identifying the similarities and differences in the use of logical connectors by EFL students who have different writing proficiency levels, b) exploring the relationship between the students’ use of logical connectors and the quality of their writing, and c) finding out the causes that affect the learners’ use of logical connectors. To conduct this study, it is hypothesised that if students had higher writing proficiency, they would use accurately logical connectors, and would better perform in them semantically and stylistically. To check the hypothesis, two research tools are used, a questionnaire and a corpus analysis. These tools helped identifying the present relationship between the writing quality and the use of cohesive devices. The analysis of the findings provided a clear picture that there is no correlation between learners’ use of logical connectors and their writing quality, which means that the hypothesis was disconfirmed. Hence, there is no clear pattern of using connectors in relation to the level of students’ writing performance. In other words, students do not benefit from the facilitating role connectors play in revealing relations between ideas in the building up of meaning.