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Complex conjunctives and their impact on cohesion and coherence in upper-secondary students' semi-formal essays
Kloučková, Julie ; Pípalová, Renata (advisor) ; Nádraská, Zuzana (referee)
The thesis aims to explore the usage of complex conjunctives in upper-secondary students' semi-formal essays. It deals with written discourse produced by two groups of students of B1 and B2 (CEFR) levels, uncovers the differences in their use, explores their impact on cohesion and coherence and looks at the students' understanding of these concepts. In total, 40 essays in two B1 and B2 subcorpora are analysed through a corpus analysis tool inspired by the framework of Halliday and Hasan. Prior to that, analyses of writing sections in three students' books from the perspective of Teachability Hypothesis and Processability Model are conducted to establish the potential frequency and conjunctive type scale. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that upper-intermediate students employ more complex conjunctives than intermediate students, even though the difference is not substantial. The data also indicate that both groups prefer initial sentence placements to the medial positions, and that additives are used over adversatives. Furthermore, the analyses uncovered surprising results, for example, in the area of paragraph-initially and paragraph- internally used conjunctives. The research shows that complex conjunctives are essential in semi-formal and formal writings and that especially...
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