Exploring Cohesive Devices in Essay Writing of Third Year Students of English at Mohamed Lamine Debaghine , Setif 2 University

Abstract

This study aims at exploring cohesive devices in third year EFL students’ essays at Setif 2 University. A sample of 40 essays of third year students was taken for a corpus analysis. Findings revealed that lexical cohesion was the most employed one, followed by reference. Encountered errors in using cohesive devices caused a lack of cohesion in their writings. The most common errors were categorized into overuse of repetition of the same words, misuse of conjunctions, and inappropriate collocations. Pedagogical implications were provided for more insights about cohesion to be applied in writing classes.