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چکیده
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Abstract This descriptive study aimed at investigating EFL students’ familiarity with employing lexical and grammatical cohesive devices (LCDs/GCDs) in generating argumentative and expository texts. A learner corpus sample comprising 36 written argumentations and expositions was analyzed according to Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) lexical and grammatical cohesion framework, by using SPSS statistic software. The mixed-methods research design was conducted to identify the most and least frequently utilized LCDs/GCDs in terms of numbers, and to disclose the difficulties encountered by the learners in using these linking ties. The first conclusion drawn from this study indicated that the students’ proficiency levels had a significant role in their writing skill, especially in using grammatical and lexical cohesive devices; that is, the students at the elementary level used fewer cohesive ties than those at intermediate and advanced proficiency levels, and the learners at the intermediate level used fewer cohesive ties than those in the advanced level. The second conclusion drawn from this study showed that students used more grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in argumentative writings (GCDs=428, LCDs=209) than in expository writings (GCDs=306, LCDs= 185). In addition, the last conclusion drawn from this study showed that learners had problems in using grammatical (misuse, excessive use, limited use, pronoun shift, ambiguity, and run on sentences) and lexical (excessive use) cohesive ties. Some pedagogical implications are provided to help EFL teachers enhance learners’ skills in generating more cohesive written discourse. These included blending reading with writing activities, teaching GCDs/LCDs explicitly, helping learners to think in English while writing, exploiting writing as a thinking tool, and using corpora in learning and teaching practices. Key words: Writing, argumentative writing, expository writing, cohesion
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