Explanation:
There is a consensus among those dealing with the English writing of L1 Arabic users that the use of cohesive devices in writing is one of the most difficult skills for those learners of English to develop. Enkvist (1990) considered the achievement of cohesion in writing as an indefinable, obstruct, and controversial concept which is difficult to teach and difficult to learn.
Discourse unity, according to Tanskanen (2006), can only be established via the use of cohesive devices that contribute to text cohesion. Consequently, a text, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), is “any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole” and “is best regarded as a semantic unit” (p. 1). Halliday and Hasan (1976) perceived cohesion as the only factor that distinguishes texts from nontexts. This position was supported by Alarcon and Morales (2011), who stated that cohesion refers to the linguistic features which help make a sequence of sentences a text. The mastery of cohesive devices is a crucial element of effective academic writing and essential for academic success in any university program where English is the medium of instruction. Consequently, the utilization of cohesive devices in academic writing has attracted the attention of many researchers who are endeavoring to address the issue of lack of cohesion in students’ writing, especially in those countries, such as Oman, where English is taught as a foreign language.
A number of studies focusing on cohesive devices have been conducted in different countries where English is taught as a foreign language. Liu and Braine (2005) investigated cohesive features in argumentative writing produced by 96 1st-year Chinese undergraduate students. The study showed that students were incapable of using cohesive devices proficiently in their writing. Thus, the authors stressed the need for further research in the area of teaching writing to enhance the awareness of students regarding the significance and implementation of cohesive devices in their texts (Liu & Braine, 2005). Xuefan (2007) analyzed the use of lexical cohesive devices by 15 each of 1st- and 3rd-year English majors from Wuyi University in China. The findings of the study demonstrated that proficiency levels did not influence the students’ implementation of cohesive devices in their writing. Furthermore, the researcher indicated that repetition was more significantly used than other types of lexical cohesion. Yang and Sun (2012) investigated the cohesive devices in argumentative writing by 2nd- and 3rd-year undergraduate Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners at different proficiency levels. The researchers emphasized that the writing quality of the students determined the appropriate use of cohesive devices regardless of their EFL proficiency levels. Crossley and McNamara (2012) examined the possibility of predicting second language (L2) writing proficiency through the use of different linguistic features. The analysis included varied linguistic features that evaluate text cohesion and linguistic sophistication. The study’s corpus consisted of 514 essays that were collected from graduating Hong Kong high-school students at seven different grade levels. The study’s analysis stressed the notion that proficiency did not produce texts that were more cohesive, though they constructed texts that were more linguistically sophisticated.
