Cohesion and text development in written Arabic
Many English teachers posed the problem that their Arab students were able to construct grammatically correct sentences, but were frequently unable to form them into paragraphs or cohesive texts. In my attest to investigate this problem, I started from the assumption that differing patterns of cohesion in English and Arabic probably account for many difficulties Arab students have in writing English. Sane attempts to look at this, based on a contrastive approach, have already been carried out. For my part, I felt the time had came to look at the systems of Arabic in their own terms, which has not yet been done. For this I followed two avenues of study: Functional Sentence Perspective as developed in the Prague School and Halliday and Hasan's work on textual cohesion. For my purpose I selected four lengthy Arabic texts belonging to different text-types which I first analysed from the Functional Sentence Perspective point of view. For this, I followed Dane's (1974) study of thematic progressions, in order to find out what theme-rheme patterns the different Arabic text-types use. In the next step, I investigated the cohesive ties used in written Arabic Halliday and Hasan's model of textual cohesion (1976). I
Mehamsadji, M.
PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania ; Memory, Text and Place
Cohesion and text development in written Arabic. Many English teachers posed the problem that their Arab students were able to construct grammatically correct sentences, but were frequently unable to form them into paragraphs or cohesive texts. In my attest to investigate this problem, I started from the assumption that differing patterns of cohesion in English and Arabic probably account for many difficulties Arab students have in writing English. Sane attempts to look at this, based on a contrastive approach, have already been carried out. For my part, I felt the time had came to look at the systems of Arabic in their own terms, which has not yet been done. For this I followed two avenues of study: Functional Sentence Perspective as developed in the Prague School and Halliday and Hasan's work on textual cohesion. For my purpose I selected four lengthy Arabic texts belonging to different text-types which I first analysed from the Functional Sentence Perspective point of view. For this, I followed Dane's (1974) study of thematic progressions, in order to find out what theme-rheme patterns the different Arabic text-types use. In the next step, I investigated the cohesive ties used in written Arabic Halliday and Hasan's model of textual cohesion (1976). I
cohesion_text development write arabic many english_teacher pose_problem arab_student able construct grammatically correct sentence frequently unable form paragraph cohesive text attest investigate problem start assumption differ pattern cohesion english_arabic probably account many difficulty arab_student write_english attempt look base contrastive already carry_out part felt time come look system arabic term yet follow_two avenue study functional sentence perspective develop prague school halliday work textual_cohesion purpose select lengthy arabic_text belong_different text types first analyse functional sentence perspective point_view follow study thematic progression order theme_rheme pattern different arabic_text types use next step investigate cohesive tie use write arabic halliday model textual_cohesion