Role of Cohesive Devices in English Reading Exercises of IELTS Examination

Abstract

This research tried to explore all the types of lexical and grammatical cohesive devices in the IELTS reading passages. The main object of this research is to identify all the types of cohesive devices and functions of these cohesive devices in the reading passages by using the model that was presented by Haliday and Hasan (1976) model of cohesion and its functions in the reading passages and which cohesive device is highly used in the passages and which is the lowest cohesive device. The researcher has used IELTS reading passages because the main purpose of this study is to give benefit to those second language learners who are trying to broaden their reading comprehension skills.  Haliday and Hasan presented two types of cohesive devices one is Grammatical cohesive devices (reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctions),  and the second is Lexical cohesive devices (reiteration, synonyms, meronymy, hyponymy and collocation). The researcher has analyzed all of them by using a mix method approach. Firstly the researcher has downloaded “Cambridge IELTS Academic Set 1 to 18 Books” the researcher has picked just 1st 10 books from the 18 books and analyzed just very 1st reading passages of all the 1st 10 books. These first ten books contain 133 passages in which the researcher has selected just very 1st reading passages. The researcher has chosen these books because they are available on the internet and these books contain reading passages in which the researcher has to analyze cohesive devices from them. Firstly the researcher analyzed all the data and found out all the types of cohesive devices and highlighted all of them by observing the researcher herself and then counted all the devices through the help of “Antconc” software. So, the corpus based study utilizes to find out the data. The results of the study shows that the authors has used reference 28.3%, conjunctions 16.3%, ellipsis 1.4%, substitution 2.8%, repetition 3.2%, synonyms 3.3%, antonyms 2.5%, hyponymy 2.8%, meronymy 1.7%, and collocation 37.2%. The total amount of cohesive devices that are used in all the 1st 10 reading passages are 3,555. The researcher concluded his research to find out that the highest grammatical cohesive device is reference and lowest is ellipsis and the highest lexical cohesion is collocation and lowest is Meronymy.