Reiteration relations in EFL student academic writing and the effects of online learning

Abstract

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 EFLundergraduate 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.