Topic Development With Reference To Cohesive And Clause Relational Features In English Students' Writing Activities

Abstract

Composition teachers have gone so far in preoccupying themselves solely with the formal and syntactic, rather than semantic and pragmatic features of language to such an extent that far more important aspects of language and of conimunication linguistic or otherwise, have fallen victims of unnecessary ill- treatment and neglect. Cohesion and coherence are two such concepts fundamental to any normal writing and speaking activities. . • Studies about cohesion and coherence have proliferated. None has so far been approached in language teaching proper and particularly Damascus University. Therefore, this work is considered as an endeavour to tackle the problems which university students encounter in their attempt to have something communicated and the labouring efforts they exert while trying to read and comprehend a written text. Meanwhile, several enquiries will hopefully be answered concerning the nature of this notoriously difficult process ofwriting I reading. Special attention will be paid to the strategies and the clues which students should adopt and focus on before an attempt is made on their part at getting their thoughts down on paper. More emphasis will be laid on the grammar of cohesion and the way cohesive ties function in a text and whether cohesion is a necessary prerequisite for achieving coherence and the different perspectives from which texts can be approached. What is attempted to be done, as well, is investigating the ' methods implemented in order to infer and puzzle out the pragmatic meaning and the underlying message whish the writer is striving to convey hinging on a main theory that advocates these procedures namely, the theory of pragmatics. What will be elaborated on, in this respect, are the pragmatic articles, variously called, discourse markers or coherence markers which signal different speech acts (illocutionary acts) sentences are bound to perform in order to denote the rhetorical structure of discourse that can roughly be defined as "the underlying patterns of meaning that are given expression through the rp.edium of text" (Nuttall, 1982). A considerable part of this work will be devoted to analysing a randomly chosen number of Damascus University students' writing activities. The analysis will be the conducted in the light of the cohesive ties students resort to in order to develop a topic of concern.