Grammatical Coherency in Academic Writing of Arabic Speaking Students and Iranian Students of Arabic Language and Literature

Writing is the most advanced part of four language learning skills and it is a difficult and complicated process. In this process, a language learner is expected to produce a text which has suitable characteristics and components of a text and since one of the text indices is coherence, the present study performs a comparative analysis of grammatical coherence in scientific writings of Arabic speakers and Iranian MA students of Arabic literature according to functional linguistic model developed by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. The study was based on data collecting and statistical analysis. The samples were consisted of 30 MA theses in Arabic literature by Iranian students and Arabic speaker students. Grammatical coherence elements (reference, deletion, substitution, connection) were collected from the samples and measured their frequency. The data analysis was performed by statistical methods of t-test and Friedman test. According to the results of the tests, the MA theses of two groups were compared and the quality and frequency of the elements of text coherence were studied in the writings of two groups. The conclusion is that the frequency of all the 17 indices of grammatical coherence in MA theses of Arabic speaker students was more than Iranian students of Arabic literature. Based on the results of T-test, the difference of the coherence elements in two groups was significant and accordingly the theory of the study was proved, that is MA theses of Arabic speaker students have more coherence, cohesion, and integration than MA theses of Arabic learners. Meanwhile, some grammatical and writing errors, and carelessness in sentences and using conjunctions in the writings of the second group make the texts incoherent.