A Study on Cohesive Devices in the Writing Samples of Advanced Persian Learners

Cohesive devices play an integral role in creating fluent and integrated texts. According to a recent approach presented by Halliday and Matthiessen, systematic functional grammar, which was adopted in this study, divides cohesive devices into two categories, namely, grammatical and lexical. The purpose of the present study was to compare the use of cohesive devices in the advanced level learners’ writing samples at two teaching Persian centers in Mashhad, including teaching Persian to non-Persian learners at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and Al-Mustafa Al-Alamieh. Overall, 200 writing samples were collected and analyzed. All advanced level learners in both centers participated in this study. Learner's gender was also taken into account. In order to analyze the significant difference between variables, the collected data were entered into the SPSS software (Version 23) and T-test was applied. The results of the study revealed that, the average use of repetition and reference that are related to lexical and grammatical categories were used more than the other cohesive devices in both institutes. The average use of hyponymy and metonym was low. Of all types of grammatical devices, reference was the most frequent and the least frequent were ellipsis and substitution; In addition, it was observed that there was a significant difference between performance of Persian learners in applying of some cohesive devices such as substitution and ellipsis, reference, metonym, hyponymy, and synonym; also there was a significant difference between male and female participants; in other words, females applied cohesive devices more frequently than their male counterparts.