multilingual advantage in lexical cohesion: a comparative analysis of bilingual and multilingual graduate students’ theses in applied linguistics

Lexical cohesion (lc) is an important index that could make a text scholarly and publishable. despite the recognition of lc as a vital component of scholarly writing, the extent to which authors’ linguistic background might influence lc use has been rarely addressed. this paper was a novel attempt considering the effects of four linguistic backgrounds on lc negotiation in thesis literature reviews crafted by bilingual and multilingual graduate students in applied linguistics. the study selected 70 theses developed by multilingual kurdish and turkish and bilingual farsi and arabic ma and phd students in applied linguistics. two types of lc, namely local and global, each consisting of three indices of lemmas, synonyms, and content words, were considered for our thematic analysis. the corpus analysis showed that synonym congruity was the most commonly employed lc index, followed by lemmas and content words. the findings also revealed that multilingual kurdish students used a higher number of lc indices, particularly in terms of global lc. the second group that ranked at the top involved multilingual turkish writers who mainly relied on local lc. on the other hand, bilingual farsi and arabic students used a lower number of lc indicators compared to the other two. the study offers helpful insights for academic writing research and pedagogy.