A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF COHESION IN HOMOGENEOUS TEXTS FROM FIRST LANGUAGE ENGLISH AND TURKISH COURSEBOOKS

İNGİLİZCE VE TÜRKÇE ANADİLİ DERS KİTAPLARINDAKİ TÜRDEŞ OKUMA METİNLERİNİN KARŞITSAL BAĞLAŞIKLIK ÇÖZÜMLEMESİ

Abstract

With the purposes of comparing the use of conjunction and lexical cohesion and evaluating the textual quality in first language coursebooks, texts of the same type, chosen from English and Turkish series for 11-14 year-olds, were subjected to discourse-semantic analysis. The categorization of the conjunctive and lexical items according to functional grammar revealed that Turkish texts made more use of conjunction, especially of the additive and temporal types, and were more inclined to restate or clarify, whereas English texts preferred to realize conjunctive relations with structural resources of dependent clauses. Also, despite the variation in the text size, English texts managed to maintain topical focus by entering into major lexical strings, and both corpora were similar in terms of metonymy, while English texts were richer in expectancy relations and collocations of meaningfully-related nouns. Introduction Several studies of learner products in the native language supported that cohesion, coherence and the overall quality of the text are in interaction, and when poor writers were found to use fewer devices of cohesion, the teaching of their use by presenting conjunctives in reading texts became the purpose (Connor, 1999; Lenk, 1998; Lunsford, 1990). As a result, while first language learners trace the cohesive elements in the reading texts, they learn as readers how to solve text difficulties, and also as writers how to produce meaningful and connected sentences (Gamble & Yates, 2002). It is the coursebook that forms the primary resource for presenting the functioning of cohesive devices most comprehensively and intensively. The cohesive features of the reading texts in the coursebook has a great influence especially on the child reader’s comprehension, and the perceptive capacity for cohesive elements in the text gradually improves by making a big leap between the ages of 8-13. (Chapman, 1982; Gamble & Yates, 2002). For this reason, this study aimed to reveal the patterns of use for the cohesive devices in the reading texts chosen for the coursebook, the child reader’s immediate source of reference. Homogeneous texts, extracted from first language English and Turkish coursebooks, were subjected to systemic-functional analysis in line with Halliday and Hasan’s (1985) model of cohesion, and the cohesive items were compared in the bilingual corpora of pedagogical texts. While coherence is simply defined as the unity and totality of meaning in the text, the textuality of a group of sentences can only be claimed, if it is compatible with its environment; that is, it has texture (Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Stoddard, 1991). Eggins, (2000), on the other hand, argued that coherence is concerned with the contextual properties of a text, whereas cohesion is related to its internal properties, and if there is a text as part of discourse, this text must be in harmony with both the İngilizce ve Türkçe Anadili Ders Kitaplarındaki Türdeş Okuma Metinlerinin… 863 Turkish Studies International Periodical For the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic Volume 10/7 Spring 2015 situational context and with itself; in other words, it must be cohesive (Halliday & Hasan, 1985). According to functional grammar, there are five cohesive devices that compose a text by interpreting the preceding and following elements in a semantic relationship of dependency above the sentence level: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Method The corpus of the study was comprised of the reading texts, derived from the local, MoNE-approved coursebook, “İlköğretim Türkçe 6-7-8”, (İÖT) and the famous series of an international publisher, “Cambridge Checkpoint English 7-8-9” (CCE) (Cox, 2012, 2013, 2014; Deniz, 2013a, 2013b; Şahin, 2013). The qualitative data from the narrative, biographical, and informative texts was examined with the descriptive analysis method. While comparing the density of the cohesive devices, their proportion to the total number of sentences or words were take into consideration, as in Eggins’ (2000) example. After the texts were transferred to Word, word counts and numeration of sentences were completed, the conjunctive items were labelled with respect to their functional categories and the lexical strings were identified. Finally, the frequencies and percentages were calculated by Excel and tabulated. Findings In the current study, undertaken for explicating the patterns of conjunction and lexical cohesion in use, and evaluating the quality of similar reading texts from first language English and Turkish coursebooks on the basis of the operation of cohesion, it was found that regardless of the text type, (1) Turkish texts used conjunction more frequently, (2) conjunction use did not develop in line with the textbook grade, (3) the additive and temporal types of conjunction dominated and the sentences tended to restate or clarify instead of expanding the meaning by means of reason, result, contrast and condition relations, while in English texts (4) conjunction increased with the level, (5) no distinction was made in the use of the additive, adversative, causal and temporal types of conjunction, but (6) conjunctive relations were realized with structural resources, within dependent clauses, and thus, (7) textual interpretation was facilitated by providing the child reader with more linguistic cues. Also, even though the text size changed, the lexical density was always higher in Turkish texts, whereas English texts were equally efficient in maintaining topical focus by entering into major lexical strings, and the lexical density in both texts appeared to increase with the grade. As for the lexical cohesion, Turkish and English texts were similar in terms of metonymy, whereas English texts were richer in expectancy relations and collocations of meaningfullyrelated nouns. Discussion and Conclusion The systemic-functional analysis of cohesion in homogeneous texts

Özet

Bağlama, yapısal bağlantı olmaksızın tümce ötesinde mantıksal ilişkiler kurmayı ve sözcüksel bağlaşımsa göndergesel özdeşlikten bağımsız olarak sözcük kümeleri içindeki anlambilimsel ilişkileri çözmeyi gerektirdiğinden çocuk okuyucuya en çok güçlük sunan bağlaşıklık araçlarıdır. Bu çalışmada, 11-14 yaş grubuna yönelik İngilizce ve Türkçe anadili ders kitaplarından seçilen türdeş (öyküleyici, biyografik, bilgilendirici) okuma metinleri söylemsel-anlambilimsel çözümlemeye tabi tutulmuş; bağlayıcı ve sözcüksel birimler işlevsel dilbilgisine göre sınıflandırılıp sıklık-yüzde hesapları yapılmıştır. Sonuçta, türden bağımsız olarak, Türkçe okuma metinlerinde (1) daha sık bağlamaya başvurulduğu, (2) bağlama kullanımının ders kitabının düzeyine göre gelişim göstermediği, (3) bağlamanın ekleyici ve zamansal türlerinin baskın olduğu ve neden, sonuç, karşıtlık, koşul ilişkileriyle anlamı genişletmek yerine yeniden ifade etme veya açıklık getirmenin yeğlendiği belirlenmiş; İngilizce okuma metinlerinde ise (4) bağlamanın düzeyle birlikte arttığı, (5) bağlamanın ekleyici, çeliştirici, nedensel veya zamansal türleri arasında ayrım gözetilmediği, ama (6) bağlayıcı ilişkilerin yapısal kaynaklar yardımıyla bağımlı tümcecikler içinde gerçekleştirildiği ve böylece (7) çocuk okuyucuya daha çok dilsel ipucu sağlanarak metni çözmenin kolaylaştırıldığı anlaşılmıştır. Ayrıca metin büyüklüğü değişse bile Türkçede sözcüksel yoğunluğun hep daha yüksek olduğu, buna karşılık İngilizcedeki sözcüksel birimlerin ana diziler oluşturarak konusal odağı sağlamakta Türkçeden geri kalmadığı ve ders kitabının düzeyi yükseldikçe sözcüksel yoğunlukların arttığı gözlemlenmiştir. Sözcüksel bağlaşım sağlamada, Türkçe ve İngilizce metinler parça/bütün türündeki ilişkilerin kullanımı yönünden benzeşirken, İngilizce metinlerin beklentisel ilişkiler ve anlamca yakın adların eş dizimliliğinden zengin olduğu ortaya çıkmıştır