Matters of cohesion in L1 and L2 academic texts

This study presents a comparative analysis of median frequency rates of explicit cohesive devices employed in academic texts of students who were speakers of such languages as English, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and Arabic. Specifically, the study focuses on the median frequency rates of uses of explicit cohesion devices, such as phrase-level coordinators, sentence transitions, logical­ semantic conjunctions, demonstrative pronouns, and enumerative and resultative nouns in academic texts of native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) . The purpose of this study is determine the specific differences and similarities in the uses of explicit cohesion devices in a NS and NNS corpus of 897 academic essays totalling 265,812 words.