초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Various studies have examined factors affecting the textual cohesion, coherence, and flow of Koreans’ second language writing in English, particularly focusing on articles, connectors, or discourse markers, as well as the overuse and repetitive use of nouns and pronouns. How¬ever, noun use in adjuncts and its effects on information flow and cohesion remain relatively unexplored. This study examines such patterns in an L1 and L2 writing corpus to examine the effects of noun repetition and noun phrase complexity on cohesion. Words counts and multiple variables from Coh-Metrix analysis indicate overuse or repetition of nouns, overuse of cer-tain pronouns, and underuse of syntactic adjuncts, namely, prepositional phrases. Qualitative examination of some essays confirms these patterns of noun usage. The L2 writers relied on simple sentences with few adjuncts that highlight noun or pronoun objects, and some make ineffective or excessive use of lexical and referential cohesion instead of more sophisticated (i.e., grammatically and lexically complex) sentences. This can lead to a more unnatural topic flow and development in paragraphs, with fairly one-dimensional sentence cohesion patterns. Thus, learners need more instruction in noun phrase variety, sentence variety, natural patterns of information flow, and appropriate grammatical sophistication in their paragraphs.
