the analysis of cohesive devices in efl university students' essays

It is assumed that writing is the most problematic language skill for efl learners. the learners ought to be aware of the procedure of writing by mastering the formal and structural features of a language. any text is organized by using linguistic relationships (cohesive relations) and non-linguistic relationships (coherent relations). this study aims to investigate the use of cohesive devices utilized by efl students in their essays. to achieve this objective, the study adopts halliday and hasan s theory of cohesion. forty essays were collected as data for this research. efl students of bojnord university wrote the essays for the course essay writing. the researcher uses both qualitative and quantitative and qualitative procedures in analyzing the data. data analysis involves steps of identification of frequencies and ratios of the students production of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices and then, the comparison between the frequencies and ratios of these two devices. the result indicates that the tendency of the participants is more on using grammatical devices than lexical devices. they rarely use synonymy, antonymy, collocation, and hyponymy in their essays. also, the study reveals that the students confronted difficulties using these devices. the problem lies in the participants