An Analysis of Cohesive Device Deployment in the Free and Guided writings of Iranian EFL Undergraduates

This study investigates the deployment of cohesive devices by Iranian undergraduate EFL learners under free and guided writing conditions and compares their cohesive patterns with those observed in the non-native component of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Using a comparative within-subjects design, ۲۸ Iranian undergraduate students each produced one free-writing and one guided-writing essay (۵۶ essays in total), which were analyzed alongside ۲۸ MICUSP papers. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan's (۱۹۸۵) Cohesive Harmony framework, the study conducts a quantitative analysis of the frequency and distribution of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices across the three corpora. The findings reveal distinct cohesive profiles. Across both Iranian writing conditions, grammatical cohesion, particularly reference (۳۹–۴۲% of all cohesive devices), constituted the predominant strategy, with extensive use of exophoric pronominals. In contrast, the MICUSP corpus relied more heavily on lexical cohesion, especially lexical repetition (۴۶%), contributing to terminological continuity and thematic development in academic discourse. The free-writing corpus exhibited a higher normalized frequency of cohesive device occurrences than the guided-writing corpus, whereas several cohesive resources, including ellipsis, substitution, equivalence, and semblance, occurred relatively infrequently across all three corpora. The findings suggest that different writing contexts encourage different patterns of cohesive resource use and highlight the pedagogical value of explicit instruction that expands learners' repertoire of grammatical and lexical cohesive strategies in academic writing.

کلیدواژه ها:

Cohesion ، Free writing ، Guided writing ، Halliday and Hassan&rsquo ، s Theory ، MICUSP