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Context and Culture via Cohesive Devices in Higher Education Students’ and Professional Writers’ Opinion Articles
Abstract
The literature on cohesive devices is marked with evident dearth in studies that consider the
context-text ties. The current paper attempts to fill this gap, and, therefore, combat an idealised
‘villain’ in research, which is confining textual analysis to in-text relations. The study
propounds the idea of expanding the analysis to include ties between the written text and the
surrounding context and culture. The specific purpose is to explore the use and function of the
cohesive devices which link the text to the context (exophora) and the ones that relate the text
to the culture (homophora). The methodology involved explaining the cohesive devices to a
postgraduate TESOL class of eight students (non-native speakers of English) in one of the
universities in the UAE. After that, the students were asked to work in pairs and produce four
opinion articles about a recent newspaper topic of their choice. They selected the United
Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP) leader’s call to ban the burqa in the UK. In addition, two
articles from the Independent and the Guardian on the same topic were also discussed.
Comparative analysis was conducted on the six articles vis-à-vis the use and functions of
cohesive devices. The analysis involved four categories: person deixis, spatial deixis, temporal
deixis, and the definite article. The findings showed that exophoric and homopohric cohesive
devices were employed abundantly, with exophora occurring in more instances. The study also
revealed the relevant functions that have evident implications about assumptive and supportive
roles of cohesive devices.