COHESION, INTERLANGUAGE AND EMERGENT TEXTURE IN THE WRITTEN ENGLISH OF UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA STUDENTS

COHESION, INTERLANGUAGE AND EMERGENT TEXTURE IN THE WRITTEN ENGLISH OF UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA STUDENTS

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

This study examines text cohesion from the platform of interlanguage and emergent texture in the essays of final year students in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The work is predicated on the fact that writing is the major language skill for academic discourse and examination which helps to convey information about abilities and competencies in the use of the English language as a second language in our society. Writing is a means through which people generally express their feelings, needs, and ideas in a permanent form. It is an important aspect of literacy and an indispensable repository of knowledge and history over the ages.

Otagburuagu notes that the nature and complexity of writing have often been of concern to writers. Watson cited in Otagburuagu posits that writing is hard and so does not involve a single process (4-5). The writing competence of university graduates has provoked a lot of criticisms from employers of labour, teachers, examiners and the Nigerian public. According to The Guardian Newspaper, a World Bank sponsored study posits that; “Nigerian University graduates are poorly trained and unproductive on the job” (19 Feb, 1). The report identified two areas of poor performance of Nigerian graduates as: poor mastery of the English language and lack of writing skill. This has been a source of worry and concern to parents, employers and the government. This is because it would be impossible for any student to do well in examinations without the mastery of the English language, which is the medium of expression – oral and written.

A recurrent complaint by Chief Examiners of the English Language of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has always centred on the poor quality of the candidates’ writing. For example, the WAEC Chief Examiners’ Reports of May/June 2000 showed that candidates still exhibit ignorance of the rudiments of the English Language. Also November/December 2003 report of the same body shows the extremity of the poor performance of students in the English Language. As observed, the majority of the weaknesses had to do with little or no exposure to writing skills. The WAEC Chief Examiners identified the areas of poor performance as construction of loose sentences, transliteration from mother tongues and abuse of basic rules of grammar. This manifests in the lack of cohesion, especially in their essay writing. Again, the WAEC May/June 2007 Report reiterates, “contrary to expectation, the performance of the candidates (in the English Language) was awfully poor…. It appears that a good number of schools registered illiterates and unqualified candidates for this test” (7).

Although universities across the nation run a compulsory Use of English programme which aims at the remediation of the language deficiencies and also acquisition of competence-based language skills for undergraduates, the deteriorating standards in the written English of the students do not seem to change (Murphy 153). This means that the acquisition of proficiency in the writing skill may be more difficult in a multilingual setting.  Murphy stipulates that the majority of the language learners take some definitions of lexical richness to be central in any adequate account of measurement (153). When approaching the issue of the development of second language writing, applied linguists draw a sharp line between the categories of lexis and grammar in order to focus their attention on the development of lexis. Those who learn English as a Second Language are usually faced with a number of problems one of which is cohesion.

1.2 Text

According to Werlich, a text refers to one or more sentences which occur sequentially and are related to each other in their meanings. He writes that a text is an extended structure, a syntactic unit such as words, groups, clauses, and textual units that are marked by coherence (23). Beaugrande and Dressler in their contribution contend that a text is a naturally occurring manifestation of language, that is, as a communicative language event in a context. The SURFACE TEXT is the set of expressions actually used; these expressions make some knowledge EXPLICIT, while other knowledge remains IMPLICIT, though still applied during processing (63). The importance of a text in communication has been emphasized by such scholars as Halliday and Hasan who define a text as a term used to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole(1-2). Werlich; Kress; Fowler; Neubert; and Hatim and Mason see a text in different perspectives. For example, Werlich sees a text as an extended structure of syntactic units, “a text as a super-sentence” (23).

According to Murray, comprehending a text entails connecting the phrase or sentence that is currently being read with the contents of the immediate preceding sentence. This process is multifaceted and involves several factors one of which is the use of cohesive devices. These devices, which include grammatical and lexical cohesion, mark out explicitly how one section of a text is related to another. Text creation has been brought to prominence by Enkvist, Gutwinski, Halliday and Hasan, and Beaugrande and Dressler. These cohesive devices are essential for adequate text comprehension and English as a Second Language (ESL) writers need to use them appropriately to increase the comprehensibility of their texts. Comings, as stated by Malgwi, proposes a three-fold component of writing as text, process, and discourse when she defined writing not just as text in written script but also the act of writing, composing and encoding language into text which entails discourse interaction within a socio-cultural context.

Writing, as it is, creates a big problem for learners of the English language. Since mid-1960’s, the investigation of the written composition of second language learners has been a central issue for applied linguists (Murphy 2001). She points out that the majority of the language learners take some definitions of lexical richness to be central in any adequate account of measurement. This means that when approaching the issue of the development of second language writing, applied linguists draw a sharp line between the categories of lexis and grammar in order to focus their attention on the development of lexis.

Writing is a complex process in that the writer, as Thernton explains, does not face his reader as the speaker ordinarily faces his audience but faces a piece of paper that will be read in another place at some future time. The way the writer organizes his writing is very important because that determines how the reader will read. This study will focus on cohesion as employed by undergraduates in the interlanguage corpus with the view of suggesting patterns of emergent texture which exists in their writing.  In view of the importance of cohesive devices to text creation, comprehension, and the ability to combine sentences to produce stretches of connected text, Widdowson says it “does not follow as necessary consequences of learning” (37) but there is need to explicitly describe this linguistic phenomenon in ESL texts.

The second language (L₂) learner develops some grammar which is neither the accurate form of the target language nor the typical form of the first language; hence, he creates a type of language which Selinker refers to as interlanguage. This learner language can be described based on its own internal consistency. This can also imply that the textual cohesion creation system employed by L₂ learners can also be described based on its own internal consistency, which may be independent of the target language system. Halliday and Hasan explain that speakers of English can normally, without difficulty, decide whether a piece of language that is more than one sentence in length constitutes a text. Therefore, deciding on the textuality of an interlanguage text requires an understanding of the device used by the learner to create texture.

The near absence of cohesive features in written texts, as Liu observes, is a problem that plagues many learners of English as a Second Language. This manifests as incoherent ideas, misuse or insufficient use of functional connectives, and deficiency in content lexical ties. We note after Oluwadiya cited in Malgwi that Nigerian ESL learners tend to write the way they speak and so the writing is often full of colloquialisms, and gross errors such as poor spellings, awkward sentences, mechanical errors, wrong word – formation, poor use of hyponyms and homophones, use of superficial adjectives, adverbs and prepositions; inability to use grammatical rules of agreement and so on (4). The abbreviations and uncommon informal usages of text messaging processes in contemporary (telephony) use of cell phones have even compounded the spelling and mechanical problems of the ESL learner in the writing skill. These flaws pose serious challenges for the ESL learner.

1.3 Cohesion

Cohesion is a linguistic term which examines the grammatical and lexical relationship within a text or sentence. It is a link that holds a text together and gives it meaning. Halliday and Hasan define cohesion as the set of linguistic means for creating texture. It is the unity of text- ‘sticking together’. In order to achieve cohesion, the language learner uses his own linguistic strategies which manifests in a form Selinker calls interlanguage in his writing. The product of this writing is what is termed emergent texture in the language.

Halliday’s concept of grammatical analysis sees cohesion as a major term referring to surface-structural features of an utterance or text which link different parts of sentences or large units of discourse; for  example, the cross-referencing function of pronouns, articles and some types of adverb as in:

The man went to town. However, he did not stay long….

Here, ‘he’ refers to ‘the man’.

A distinction is usually drawn with the notion of a text’s underlying coherence.

In the early seventies, a number of models of cohesion were proposed. These models dealt with cohesion from different perspectives, and they include:

1. a) Enkvist, who proposes a linguistic-stylistic model to describe textual
2. b) Gutwinski, who proposes a model of cohesion within a stratificational framework which focuses on the potential stylistic applications of studies.
3. c) Halliday and Hasan provide the most widely known view of cohesion based on the Hallidayan systemic functional grammar and the two earlier works by Hasan.
4. d) The next model is the procedural/ relational model proposed by Beaugrande and developed by Beaugrande and Dressler.

Enkvist believes that in addition to anaphoric and cataphoric reference, pronominalisation, the use of referential ‘do’ or ‘one’, and other cohesive devices traditionally discussed in sentence grammar can be used in the analysis and description of texts to determine:

1. Contextual cohesion
2. Lexical cohesion
3. Clausal linkage
4. Iconic linkage.

Contextual cohesion ‘keeps together passages occurring in the matrix of contextual features’ (Enkvist 122). In a text, each verbal strand displays typical and distinct cohesive patterns. For Enkvist, lexical cohesion suggests that coherent texts often have a homogeneous vocabulary, which contributes to their unity, and he believes that homogeneity of vocabulary may be affected by a number of factors such as the subject matter of a text and style.

Enkvist states that clausal linkage provides an arsenal of formal means of marking the ways in which clauses cohere within sentences and sentences within texts. He identifies eight types or ways of linking sentences into texts. These are:

• additive,explanatory,
• illustrative,initial,
• illative                                     adversative,
• alternative,

Iconic linkage is a term borrowed from semantics. It is used here, by Enkvist, to denote situations in which two or more sentences cohere because they are, at some level of abstraction, isomorphic. Crystal explains that, “a syntactic and semantic analysis would be isomorphic if for each syntactic unit there were a corresponding semantic unit” (256-7). He gives an example as: subject + verb +object = actor +action + goal. Here subject=actor; verb=action and object=goal.

Gutwinski’s linguistic framework for the study of cohesion in literary texts is based on the stratification theory of linguistics. The stratification theory of linguistics which was devised by an American linguist, Sydney M. Lamb in 1929, as expounded in Outline of Stratificational Grammar cited in Crystal, models “language as a system of several related layers (or strata) of structure”. Lamb suggests four or six strata in natural languages (453). Lamb, also cited in Crystal, states that there are six strata such as phonology which comprises phonetic and phonemic strata; grammar comprises morphemic and lexemic strata; and semology comprises sememic and hypersememic (or semantic) strata (453). Semology, Crystal opines, “is a major component of stratificational grammar… which deals with the statement of meanings, both in terms of semantic features and in terms of referential/cognitive meaning” (432).  Gutwinski deviates from the Hallidayan model because of his belief that it lacks explicitness in developing “a semology or even a fully worked-out tactic (systematic arrangement) for its upper stratum (lexical hierarchy) or lexis”, a problem he also associates withtagmemics (Gutwinski 23). He proposes two main cohesive features:

1. Grammatical Cohesion: anaphora and cataphora
2. pronouns
3. substitutes

iii. coordination and subordination.

1. Lexical Cohesion:
2. repetition of items
3. occurrence of synonyms or items formed on same root

iii. occurrence of items from the same lexical set.

Halliday and Hasan present five types of cohesion strategies by which cohesion is achieved in English. Four of these strategies they termed ‘grammatical cohesion’ which includes:

1. conjunction
2. reference

• ellipsis and

1. substitution

Lexical cohesion, which is the fifth, is part of what they termed ‘cohesive relations’ that is achieved through ‘selection of vocabulary’ (275).

Beaugrande and Dressler identify two perspectives to cohesion. The first views cohesion as sequential connectivity between elements within phrases, clauses and sentences (short-range cohesion) and the second (long-range cohesion) concerns connectivity within stretches of text of longer range. In the long-range cohesion, they outlined devices for exhibiting how already-used structures and patterns can be re-used, modified, or compacted. They listed the cohesive devices as:

1. recurrence ii. parallelism

iii. paraphrase iv. use of pro-forms

1. ellipsis vi. tense and aspect

vii. junction and                      viii. intonation.

The models of cohesion will be elaborated on in the literature review.

1.4 Interlanguage and emergent texture

According to Pit Corder cited in Jowitt, the term ‘interlanguage’ was introduced by Selinker in 1969 and he subsequently defined it as a separate linguistic system whose existence we are compelled to hypothesize, based upon the observed output which results from the [second language] learner’s attempted production of a target language norm” (52).

Interlanguage can also be seen as the production of psycholinguistic interaction between two linguistic systems, those of the mother tongue (MT) and the target language (TL). Non-target language forms may be present due to ‘fossilization’, whereby a learner will retain for use of his interlanguage certain items and rules of his mother tongue. ‘This is likely to happen when his interlanguage system becomes complex enough for him to be able to communicate effectively for his purpose and the motive to reconstruct is not static but a ‘dynamic system’ and a ‘developmental continuum’ which shows increasing complexity’ (Selinkerqtd. in Jowitt 52).

This means that the learner does not only affect a ‘restructuring’ of the complex system of his MT in order to learn the equally complex system of the TL, nor are his ‘errors’ solely due to the ‘transfer’ (or interference) of MT features. Jowitt further explains that the learner also undergoes a ‘recreative’ process, whereby in his mind he ‘creates’ the language afresh, and does so perhaps under the same stimulus of ‘universal grammar’ which enables him to learn his MT. Beginning with a few rules and a simple vocabulary, he develops a complex grammar and lexicon that is progressively adapted to his communicative needs. As in first language acquisition, errors are signs of false hypotheses about the TL. Second language learning is a combination of restructuring and recreative processes.

Jowitt posits that a learner’s interlanguage can be thought of as ‘special sort of dialect’, since it shares some rules with the target language. It is unlike a social dialect (or variety) in being idiosyncratic and transitional. An idiosyncratic dialect, he states, may nevertheless be shared by numerous other individuals who have the same cultural background or language-learning history (53).

The concept of emergent texture, Murphy explains, refers to the manner in which interlanguage texts gradually extend their use and control of grammatical and semantic means used to establish textual cohesion. The development of interlanguage texture encompasses the broad range of textual devices for achieving cohesion, which include the use of reiteration, synonyms and near-synonyms, anaphoric andcataphoric references.

A text has texture which is a semantic property (Halliday&Hasan; Hasan; Lemke) and is achieved through lexicogrammatical features. It is these semantic features that account for ‘texture in text’. Interlanguage texts exhibit only an elementary or emergent texture because of the underdevelopment of the system of directives for creating textual cohesion. Emergent texture is also a measure of the capacity of a given interlanguage text to function as a textual unity. Halliday and Hasan posit that, “A text has texture, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text. It derives this texture from the fact that it functions as a unit with respect to its environment”(2). Following this view, the texts of second language learners offer varying degrees of texture, ranging from those produced with virtually no consideration given to relationship among sentences or particular stretches of text to those which are barely distinguishable from texts produced by native writers. Hence, low-level interlanguage texts are distinguished by their relative lack of cohesion. Beaugrande and Dressler’s model of cohesion has two main functions in the interlanguage writing. One is the sustenance of cohesion by achieving repetition, substitution, omission, and signaling relationship. The second is contributing to efficiency rather than satisfy grammatical obligation.

The study argues that the concept of emergent texture has potential in the analysis of the wider variety of grammatical and lexical elements involved in the achievement of cohesion in the interlanguage texts. Hence, we will look at the analysis of the emergent texture of two hundred versions of the same expository writing topic, each written by a different ESL learner.

1.5 Statement of the Problem

Writing is one of the most difficult language skills to handle by both teachers and students (Watson; Otagburuagu). Because writing is learnt through the school system, learners are usually faced with a number of problems. Such problems arise from their bid to write coherently in the second language medium. This problem has provoked a lot of criticisms from employers of labour, teachers, examiners and the Nigerian public. In order to write a readable essay, the second language learner tends to mix his mother tongue with the target language, thereby creating his own language known as interlanguage (Jowitt, 53).  The learner’s inability to express his ideas coherently in writing necessitates the need to view second language written texts as meaningful in relation to the communicative purpose of writing pedagogy.

After the publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976, the concept of cohesion has been applied to different fields such as stylistics, discourse analysis, language teaching and learning, translation studies and sociolinguistics. Textlinguistic study of cohesion is relatively new. Besides not much work has been done using text linguistics in the analysis of students’ written texts. Over the years, research and experience has shown that the quality of the written texts of university students is unsatisfactory. There seems to be loss of faith in the students’ potentials to use the English language effectively for academic work and also in world of work. This situation calls for a systematic investigation of the writing corpus of the Nigerian university students in order to identify the peculiar attributes of their writing in terms of cohesion and their interlingual characteristics. Hence this study has positioned itself to use the text linguistic approach to find an answer to the following intriguing problem: what are the cohesive and the interlingual characteristics of students’ writing and to what degree can the texts students produce be said to have emergent texture of their own. Therefore, the study will take this new dimension by doing a text linguistic analysis of undergraduates’ written texts. The study will focus on the structural features used to achieve cohesion and the resultant interlanguage and emergent texture. In doing so, the study will also find out if gender influences writing. Gutwinski’s 1976 model of cohesion which focuses on grammatical and lexical cohesion will provide the benchmark for the analysis.

1.6 Research Questions

The study seeks to provide answers to the following questions:

1. What linguistic elements does the sample population employ to establish textual cohesion that characterizes the writing corpus?
2. To what extent does interlanguage manifest in the texts of the sample population?
3. What patterns of emergent texture do the texts of the study population reveal from the analysis of the linguistic elements employed in the writing corpus?
4. To what extent does the emergent texture reflect gender differences in writing?

1.7 Purpose of the Study

The primary purpose of this study is to provide a description of the cohesive devices employed in the interlanguage corpus of undergraduates’ written texts with the view to suggesting patterns of emergent texture characteristic of ESL expository writing. The study will focus on the ways by which textual cohesion is created and used in the interlanguage corpus. It will also look at the cohesive devices used by the sample population to establish textual cohesion. It will ascertain whether cohesion is necessary in the identification of a text. Also text linguistics will be used as a theoretical design in this study. Text linguistics will be explained later in the study.

1.8 Significance of the Study

This study will make significant contributions to the study of English as a Second Language (ESL) and to studies in the writing skill in English. This study will enable researchers and teachers of English language to understand ESL students’ writing in terms of cohesion, interlanguage and emergent texture. Despite the early conceptualization of cohesion by Halliday and Hasan and other linguists, few studies have attempted to identify interlanguage and emergent texture as concepts in ESL essay writing of undergraduates in Nigeria or Africa. This study will therefore fill this gap. Furthermore, the study will call attention to the peculiar characteristics of the expository texts of the study population in terms of cohesion and their usage norms. The results of this study will be of value to Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) practitioners, researchers and curriculum designers. This study is significant in the interlanguage corpus in that it adopts an analytical approach to ESL writing at the level of text. It demonstrates the ways a piece of writing could achieve cohesion. It is hoped that the findings of this study will lead to a better understanding of the linguistic features employed in creating textual cohesion by the study population.

Finally, this study fills the gap that exists in the writing pedagogy, cohesion, interlanguage and emergent texture.

1.9 Scope of the Study 

The study is an investigation of the written English of Nigerian university students. The researcher chose to use students in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka as the study population. The reason for the choice of the study population is that University of Nigeria is the first indigenous federal university in Nigeria and has students from various states of the Federation. Hence, many students from various tribes and social background in Nigeria are represented. Therefore, the study population will be drawn from the final year students in five Departments drawn from five out of the fourteen Faculties in the University. These are Faculty of Arts – Department of English and Literary Studies, Faculty of Biological Sciences – Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Education – Department of Vocational Teacher Education (VTE), Faculty of Physical Sciences – Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Faculty of Social Sciences – Department of Political Science. In view of these, we believe that collecting our data from the University will give our study a fair and representative coverage that could be generalized.

1.10 Limitation of the Study

Although this research was carefully prepared, we are still aware of its limitations and shortcomings. First of all, the research was conducted in five faculties using final year students of five departments, one department from each faculty. Despite the appeals made to the students, some of them refused to participate in writing the essays. Some of their reasons were that they do not need it in their courses and therefore should not be bothered with it; it will not add to their scores and so on. Some students asked what they will get in the form of remuneration without which some left the class. Some of them who do not want to write were making jest of those who wished to write. The lecturers in charge of the classes were of immense help to the researcher in that they used every means possible including pleas, coercion and stringent measures to ensure that the students wrote the essays. We noticed that the main reason was that they did not have confidence in themselves that they could write good essays. So, the fear of writing essays made some of them to leave the class giving excuses. These attitudes hindered our initial plan of collecting equal number of male and female essays for the analysis of gender difference in writing. Hence, we had to collect our data from those who were willing to write the essays.

Secondly, being that the sample essays will be analyzed sentence by sentence for both cohesion elements and gender difference in writing, we collected data that will not be too cumbersome to analyze. So, we had to collect two hundred (200) essays which we believe will give us the needed results.

COHESION, INTERLANGUAGE AND EMERGENT TEXTURE IN THE WRITTEN ENGLISH OF UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA STUDENTS