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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.1078-1100
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 02 Sep 2022 Revised 10 Oct 2022 Accepted 30 Oct 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202210.1078

The Use of Cohesive Devices in Korean EFL Writing across Different Proficiency Levels

Jungyeon Kim
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, Tel: 02) 2123-2329 jungyeonkim@yonsei.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study examines cohesive devices in the essays written by Korean EFL college learners across four common reference levels (CEFR) in the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). The methodology used to analyze all cohesion features in this learner corpus is the assessment of cohesion using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO). In order to see whether cohesion would vary across different proficiency levels in Korean EFL writing, this study examined fine-grained indices of four different kinds of components related to cohesive elements, i.e., lexical overlap, connectives, semantic overlap, and givenness. The statistical results suggest that the variable of lexical overlap (i.e., binary adjacent sentence overlap content lemmas) is a stronger predictor of EFL writing performance than the other variables of text cohesion. These findings expand previous corpus-based results regarding the evaluation of EFL writing quality, cohesive features in particular. The current study will bring about the expansion of new research that can investigate the role of cohesion analyses in accounting for foreign language writing proficiency.

Keywords:

cohesion, ICNALE, TAACO, Korean EFL writing

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