Using Grice's cooperative principle and its maxims to analyze problems of coherence in Turkish and English essays

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2006

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Zor, Bayram Mustafa

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Coherence in written discourse has been a problematic concept for many English Language Teachers when teaching to write in English. It is considered as a crucial part of academic written discourse, which students are expected to master to be able to pursue their academic studies. This study aims to examine how much the coherence-related difficulties/problems of Turkish EFL students in writing English essays are related to writing Turkish essays. The subjects for this study were chosen from the upper-intermediate level students at the Preparatory Program of Istanbul Bilgi University. For a detailed understanding of the nature of the coherence-related difficulties/problems of students’ Turkish and English essays, this study suggests a pragmatic analysis, involving the use of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and maxims and sub-maxims of Cooperation. This study was conducted in the middle of 2005-2006 Academic Year with the participation of 20 students who were chosen randomly. Each student was asked to write an essay in English on a given topic from their weekly program. Threeweeks later, the same students were asked to write essays on the same topic in Turkish. Thus, 20 English essays and 20 Turkish essays (i.e., Total 40 essays) were collected as data for this study. The essays were rated for coherence by three different raters. All English essays were analyzed by one monolingual Americanrater and one bilingual (Turkish and English) rater. Similarly, all Turkish essays were analyzed by one monolingual Turkish rater and the same bilingual (Turkish and English) rater. The coherence ratings showed that there is a positive significant correlation between the coherence judgments of monolingual raters and the bilingual rater, which means that both monolingual raters and the bilingual rater agree on the similar coherence judgments. Next, the essays were analyzed in light of the Gricean Maxims to find the violations of each maxim in each essay by the researcher. In the comparison of maxim violations and the coherence judgments of the raters, the maxim of Relation was found to be the most significant maxim that affected the coherence judgments of the raters both for Turkish and English essays. In addition, Manner maxim was significant for Turkish essays and Quantity maxim was significant for English essays. However, in the comparison of the violation of individual maxims in Turkish and English essays, the violation of Relation maxim in English essays was found to correlate with the violation of Relation, Quality and Quantity maxims in Turkish essays. Similarly, violation of Manner maxim in English essays was also found to correlate with the violation of Quantity and Relation maxims. On the other hand, the violation of Manner maxim in Turkish essays was found to correlate with the violation of Quantity maxim in English essays. In conclusion, by looking at these relationships between Turkish essays and English essays, it may be argued that students may have inadequacies in writing skills or may lack some writing skills in Turkish, which may cause inadequacies in English academic writing skills. However, this study suggests the same study be replicated in different contexts and with larger sample sizes, similar research studies be conducted in Turkish writing instruction in the contexts of Turkish Secondary Education, and further studies be conducted on the effect of Relation and Manner maxims on other maxims.

Subject Keywords

English.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12607724/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/16347

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

B. M. Zor, “Using Grice’s cooperative principle and its maxims to analyze problems of coherence in Turkish and English essays,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2006.