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Mục tiêu của luận văn là khảo sát những phương tiện liên kết từ vựng nào xuất hiện trong cuốn giáo trình tiếng Anh Quản trị Kinh doanh và xuất hiện với tần suất bao nhiêu, đưa ra một cái nhìn cận cảnh về cách dùng các phương tiện liên kết từ vựng này, từ đó có thể hỗ trợ cho việc dạy và học tiếng Anh chuyên ngành Kinh tế được hiệu quả hơn. Kết quả phân tích đã chứng minh, tất cả các loại liên kết từ vựng (liên kết lặp gồm có: từ đồng nghĩa, từ trái nghĩa, từ lặp, từ mang nghĩa bao hàm và liên kết kết hợp) đều xuất hiện trong cuốn giáo trình này trong đó từ lặp xuất hiện nhiều nhất. Kết quả nghiên cứu cũng cho thấy một số đặc điểm chung của diễn ngôn tiếng Anh Kinh tế, đó là các phương tiện liên kết từ vựng được sử dụng để tạo ra tính kết dính cao giữa các diễn ngôn làm cho diễn ngôn Kinh tế dễ hiểu hơn với người đọc. Kết quả nghiên cứu cũng đưa ra một số gợi ý cho việc dạy và học kỹ năng đọc và viết tiếng Anh chuyên ngành Kinh tế.
1 PART A: INTRODUCTION Rationale of the study Over the past two decades, the teaching and learning English, especially English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have changed dramatically If in the 1990's, ESP was taught in some universities in Vietnam, now it becomes a compulsory subject in almost every universities and colleges that follow the curriculum established by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) The ESP course provides students with background knowledge and vocabulary of specialist fields, therefore it helps them greatly in future careers Being aware of the major role of ESP, teachers of English at Trade Union University (TUU) have always attempted to improve the teaching and learning of ESP at their college However, there remain some difficulties as follows: At TUU, English is taught in totally five semesters of which three are for General English (GE) and two semesters are for ESP GE accounts for 135 credit periods and ESP is taught in 90 credit periods In order to attend ESP course, students are required to complete GE levels The basic English course with the main teaching and learning materials are New Headway Elementary and New Headway Pre-intermediate However, in the next stage of learning, the ESP course book requires learners of upper-intermediate and advanced level Therefore, after GE stage, students encounter numerous difficulties in learning in ESP course as they are supposedly at pre-intermediate level English for Business Studies (EBS) is chosen as the main course book of ESP at TUU The book was written by Ian MacKenzie and published in 2002 by Cambridge University Press The book comprises of 30 units of which units are chosen for ESP course level and another units for ESP course level at TUU In each unit, there are several sections covering all the four skills: listening, reading, writing, speaking Most of the units contain three parts: An informative reading text giving an overview of a particular topic with various comprehension and vocabulary exercises and discussion activities Either listening exercises or shorter authentic reading passage An additional case study, role play, discussion activity or writing exercise The listening part provides authentic interviews with business people and economists who are British and American native speakers and non-native speakers from Germany, Italy, Switzerland, India and Malaysia The listening exercises that follow are often note taking and question answering, very few tasks have multiple choice questions Therefore it is sometimes difficult for TUU's students to follow Consequently, exploiting the listening part is unfeasible for TUU's learners For speaking task, it is not practical for a class of 60 and over 60 students where the teacher's role of a conductor is vague That is, it is quite hard for teachers to cover all speaking activities Moreover, TUU's students are not competent and self-conscious enough to fulfill the given task themselves Therefore, learning speaking possibly turn out to private talking and disorder in class As for writing, the demands for the task are sometimes excessive for students Grammar is quite important in text comprehension However, most grammatical structures and rules are taught in GE and students can recall them easily without the teacher's explanation Yet, there are still complaints from our students about the difficulties they encounter while learning reading passages in BE On the one hand, it may derive from students' psychological reasons For most of them, this is the first time they learn ESP and an ESP reading text which is full of economic and business terms in business context may be a challenge Consequently, they are not willing to study attentively On the other hand, students find it is hard job to remember so many new terms and obtain a general comprehension of the text The above reasons have induced me to conduct a research on reading part, as this part is also a main part of every unit in EBS course book With some experience in teaching GE and ESP for BE students, the researcher realize the crucial role of coherence and cohesion in the text understanding and vocabulary learning of TUU's students As a result, the author decide to make an investigation into cohesive devices used in the texts of BE course book, especially lexical cohesive devices hoping that it may help students more in understanding the reading texts and learning vocabulary Scope of the study Within the framework of a minor M.A thesis, the study mainly focuses on lexical cohesive devices, the frequency of occurrence of these devices in some chosen texts in BE course book The study points out how often these lexical cohesive devices appear and how they affect the text comprehending and vocabulary learning After examining and analyzing the collected data, some pedagogical implications will be drawn for both teachers and students of BE Aims of the study The study aims at: • Figuring out how these lexical cohesive ties are used in BE sample texts of the course book EBS • Providing BE teachers and students with an insight into the use of lexical cohesive devices and thereby assisting their writing and reading comprehension Research questions In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the following questions are raised: What lexical cohesive devices are used in BE texts? What lexical cohesive devices are employed most frequently in BE texts? What are the overall features of BE discourses in terms of lexical cohesion? Methods of the study The study uses description, analysis and statistics research methods to achieve the research objectives The data for the research analysis are collected from six sample texts chosen in EBS course book namely: Sample text 1: Types of banks; Sample text 2: Companies; Sample text 3: Bonds; Sample text 4: Market leaders, challengers and followers; Sample text 5: Taxation; Sample text 6: The business cycle All the lexical cohesive items of each type of lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation) and its subtypes occur in the six texts are identified and calculated The total number of each type is then converted into percentage to compare within a text or among the categories and according to the analytical purposes Organization of the study This thesis includes three main parts The INTRODUCTION part introduces the rationale, the scope, the aims, the research questions, the research methodology and the design of the study The DEVELOPMENT comprises of two chapters - Chapter 1: provides a thorough theoretical background of three main terminologies: discourse, discourse analysis, coherence and cohesion - Chapter 2: presents the analysis of lexical cohesive devices in some reading texts in BE course book for the third year students at Trade Union University The CONCLUSION shows a recapitulation of the study, implications for teaching and learning BE, limitations of the study and suggestions for further research PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND This part introduces concepts of discourse, text, discourse analysis, discourse context, cohesion and coherence, cohesive devices which support this thesis 1.1 Discourse and discourse analysis 1.1.1 Discourse Well-known linguists have shared similar viewpoint about the concept of discourse David Nunan (1993:5) agreed that discourse is "a stretch of language consisting of several sentences which are perceived as being related in some way" Crystal (1992:25) had similar perspective of discourse when he defined discourse as "a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument or narrative" More recently, discourse is defined by Nguyễn Hòa (2004) as "a combination of sentences (or utterances) used to get our message across It has its own meaning and is more than the sum of the meaning of its constituents" 1.1.2 Discourse and Text There seem to be two different trends in linguists towards the terms "discourse" and "text" One distinguishes the two terms whereas the other does not Cook treated the terms "discourse" and "text" as two different categories when he stated: "discourse is a stretch of language perceived to be meaningful, unified and purposive Text is a stretch of language interpreted formally, without context." (Cook, 1989: 156&158, cited in Nunan, 1993:6) David Nunan used the term "text" to refer to "any written record of a communicative event" and "discourse" to refer to "the interpretation of the communicative event in context" (Nunan, 1993: 6-7) Crystal distinguished text as "a piece of naturally occurring spoken, written, or signed language identified for purpose of analysis It is often a language unit with a definable communicative function, such as a conversation, a poster." (Crystal, 1992:72, cited in Vân, 2006:14), and discourse as "a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument or narrative" (Crystal, 1992:25, cited in Vân, 2006:14) To some other scholars, text and discourse should refer to the same subject matter and may be used interchangeably Halliday and Hasan implied "discourse" when defining "text": "the word Text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length that does form a unified whole A text is a collection of related sentences, with a single sentence as the limiting case, a semantic unit This unit is related to a clause or a sentence by realization, i.e a text is realized by sentences The expression of the semantic unity of the text lies in the cohesion among the sentences of which it is composed." (Halliday & Hasan,1976:1) Vân (2006) had seen the problem of distinguishing the two terms He argued that we really not need to distinguish them as "text or discourse is an instance of language in use; this means that no text occurs without a context , any attempt to distinguish text from discourse will result in complicating the problem of terminology" Based on the definition of Halliday and Hasan (1989), he confirmed that "discourse (or text) is a unit of meaning and functional It is functional in the sense that it occurs in a context of situation In terms of size, a discourse may be realized by a word, a phrase, a clause or a sentence, a paragraph, a cluster of paragraphs, a book, or even the whole library of books." For the purpose of this study, the author would like to take the viewpoint of Hoàng Văn Vân (2006) about text and discourse as the base Therefore, the words text and discourse are treated interchangeably 1.1.3 Spoken and written discourse Although spoken and written discourse share some similar features; for example, they are used "to get things done, to provide information and to entertain" (Nunan, 1993:8); it is clear that spoken and written discourse are different in other features David Nunan (1993) made distinction between spoken and written discourse based on three categories: grammar, lexical density and situation Written discourse, linguistically, may include internally complex clauses while in spoken discourse, clauses are linked in an "addictive fashion" In particular, while written discourse may contain complete sentences with subordination, metal-lingual clause markers, spoken language may contain incomplete sentences - often simple sequences of phrases - with little subordination (the most frequent case is the coordinator "and") "Lexical density is a characteristic difference between spoken and written discourse Written discourse displays a much higher ratio of lexical (content) words ( ) to total running words" (Vân, 2006: 24) Therefore, written discourse seems to have more information packed into it According to Nunan, there is no common situation in written discourse, the situation therefore has to be inferred from the text For better understanding of the text, "the words themselves must carry all the shades of meaning" However, when readers can not signal that they not understand, "the writer must make assumptions about the reader's state of knowledge If incorrect assumptions are made, then communication may be seriously impaired " (Nunan, 1993: 14) This thesis analyzes the lexical cohesion in written discourse of Business English Therefore, only the features of written discourse will be taken into account In order to analyze a discourse, it is worth exploiting Discourse Analysis area 1.1.4 Discourse Analysis Brown and Yule (1983) state that "the term discourse analysis has come to be used with a wide range of meanings which cover a wide range of activities at the intersection of many disciplines from sociolinguistics, philosophical linguistics to computational linguistics" According to Nguyễn Hòa (2000) "discourse analysis is a study of how and for what purposes language is used in a certain context of situation and the linguistic means to carry out these purposes" The author claims that the speakers or writers are always located at the main "stage" of communication The speakers or writers initiate topics, set up presuppositions, define "information structures" and make "inference" while the hearers or readers interpret and draw inferences He comes to a conclusion that "this is essentially what makes communication a two-way process by means of language" Discourse analysis is undoubtedly the study of language in use of both written and spoken form It includes examining both form and function of the language It analyses linguistic features that characterize the social and cultural factors that help in our perception and interpretation of different texts While a discourse analysis of spoken text might focus on turn-taking, overlapping, adjacency pairs or repair, written text of this kind studies the topic development and cohesion across sentences 1.1.5 Discourse Context 1.1.5.1 Context In discourse analysis, context plays an undeniably important role in the interpretation of discourse Therefore its concept should be stated clearly Halliday (1991) defined context as "the events that are going on around" when people speak and write G Yule (1983) referred context to the "physical context" or the "linguistic context" in which words are used Nunan (1993: 7,8) claimed that "context refers to the situation giving rise to the discourse, and within which the discourse is embedded." He considered that context included two categories: linguistic and non-linguistic Linguistic context is any language surrounding or accompanying the piece of discourse under analysis while non-linguistic context involves the type of communicative event; the topic; the purpose of the event; the setting; the participants and the relationships between them and the background knowledge and assumptions underlying the communicative event Context is therefore the environment in which a discourse occurs Context refers to both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects Context can add more general information about the nature of the text, the period written, fiction or non-fiction, the age and nationality of the writer Apparently, in order to make a communicative event become successful, listeners or readers have to know the context in which the discourse occurs This helps understanding the text/discourse more thoroughly The context of situation may be captured by readers' guessing the underlied assumption or using their background knowledge In discourse analysis, context helps define reference, establish and accumulate presuppositions, i.e not repeat the old information, talk more and more new information Context helps hearer detect conversational implicature, because in different context, the implicature is interpreted differently 1.1.5.2 Context of situation The term "context of situation" was first coined by a famous British anthropologist and gifted linguist Malinowski in 1923 With this term, he meant "the total environment including the verbal environment and the situation in which the text occurs" (Malinowski, 1923 quoted in Vân, 2006: 34) Context of situation, in Malinowski's sense, indicates the environment of the text His theory established a basis for later linguists to develop their own models of context Later in their book, Halliday and Hasan (1976; 22), proposed that "field, mode and tenor collectively define the context of situation of a text" This general notion describes how the context of situation determines the kinds of meaning that are expressed According to the two authors, field is the total event, in which the text is functioning, together with the purposive activity of the speaker or writer, includes the subject-matter as one element; mode is the function of the text in the event, including both the channel taken by language (written or spoken) and its genre, or rhetorical mode, as narrative, didactic, persuasive and so on; tenor refers to the type of role interaction, the set of relevant social relations, permanent and temporary, among the participants involved Eggins (1994) shared the same viewpoint with Halliday and Hasan when he consumed that "context of situation is usually discussed under three variables: what is talked about, what the relationship between the communicators is, what role the language plays" (Eggins, 1994, 30) 10 1.2 Cohesion and coherence 1.2.1 Cohesion Cohesion plays a very crucial part in the comprehension of written discourses This can be explained as comprehension is considered a process that happens within the reader, or at least, depends on the cohesion and coherence of texts Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence which is something that the reader establishes during the process of reading Cohesion creates semantic continuity and therefore it permits coherence and comprehensibility The more explicit the cohesive relations are, the easier the text is to understand Tanskanen (1984) refers cohesion to "the grammatical and lexical elements on the surface of a text which can form connections between parts of the text" (Tanskanen, 1984: 7) Halliday & Hasan (1976) consider "the concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text" According to them, cohesion occurs when the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another The one presupposes the other When this happens, a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text 1.2.2 Coherence Halliday & Hasan (1976) claimed "coherence is the underlying organizer which makes the words and sentences into a unified discourse that conforms to a consistent world picture Coherent text is meaningful, unified and gives the impression of "hanging together"" In grammar, the sentences that don't fit together in a sensible way, though there's nothing wrong with the individual sentences, are called ungrammatical In text and discourse analysis, a text which combines such ungrammatical sentences is considered incoherent One of the key issues in text and discourse analysis is to find exactly what it is that makes some text hang together while other texts are incoherent 27 Text Antonyms (%) Text 5.3% Text 3.6% Text 13% Text 4.3% Text 4.9% Text 11.2% Table 5: The frequency of occurrence of antonyms The following table presents the contribution of the sub-types of antonymy to the cohesion of the text Text Contrary antonyms Relational antonyms Text 0% 5.3% Text 3.6% 0% Text 3.2% 9.8% Text 2.1% 2.2% Text 1.6% 3.3% Text 0% 11.2% Total 10.5% 31.8% Table 6: Frequency of occurrence of sub-types of antonymy As shown in table 6, relational antonyms appear with much higher density compared with contrary antonyms This can be explained as BE texts include numerous generalizations of 28 economic and business concepts The contrastive meaning of pairs of relational opposites in their contexts helps distinguish and therefore clarify the difficult concepts However, in text 2, no relational opposite is found Contrary opposites are also not found in text and text Here are some examples in BE texts: Example in text 5: For companies, the advantage of debt financing over equity financing is that bond interest is tax deductible In other words, a company deducts it interest payments from its profits before paying tax, whereas dividends are paid out of already-taxed profits Example in text 6: The business cycle or trade cycle is a permanent feature of market economies: gross domestic product (GDP) fluctuates as booms and recessions succeed each other In the above examples, debt - equity and boom - recession are relational antonyms The words debt and equity are mutually related as they all belong to a company but have opposite meanings Boom and recession all relate to the development stages of an economy, but differentiate in levels In the examples that follow, contrary antonyms are used to help explain the difficult concepts in BE texts Examples in text 3: Bond-issuing companies are rated by private ratings companies such as Moody's and Standard & Poors, and given an 'investment grade according to their financial situation and performance, AAA being the best, and C the worst, i.e nearly bankrupt Obviously, the higher the rating, the lower the interest rate at which a company can borrow Examples in text On the other hand, most sales taxes are slightly regressive, because poorer people need to spend a larger proportion of their income on consumption than the rich 29 Examples in text 4: Although small companies are generally flexible, and can quickly respond to market conditions, their narrow range of customers causes problematic fluctuations in turnover and profit Furthermore, they are vulnerable in a recession when, largely for psychological reasons, distributors, retailers and customers all prefer to buy from big, well-known suppliers Although small in percentage of frequency, antonyms have a great impact on the comprehension of the texts The use of antonyms in BE texts help explain the terms and notions more easily by observing the contrary relations of pairs of words, emerging the concerned topic of the paragraph and the whole text The learners will therefore interpret the texts better 2.2.1.4 Superordinates Another way of creating cohesion and coherence in text is to use superordinate Superordinate is a lexical cohesive device in which the latter noun is synonymous with the previous one in the sense of higher level of generality The general word is called the superordinate and the more specific one is called a hyponym It is commonly accepted that superordinate is for class and subclass relation This type of relation is inclusive That is, the meaning of an upper term (superdordinate) includes the meaning of a lower term (hyponym) For example: vehicle: car, bus, coach Superordinates are fairly evenly distributed in the six texts As stated in the Overview of the study, superordinate accounts for 12.8% of all lexical cohesive devices (90 out of totally 705 related items) Superordinates occur in the six texts with the frequency ranging from 11 to 15%, appear most densely in text and text with 20 and 18 related items as presented in the following table: 30 Text Superordinate Text 20 (13.4%) Text 17 (15.3%) Text 14 (11.3%) Text (9.6%) Text 18 (14.7%) Text 12 (11.2%) Total 90 (12.8%) Table 7: Frequency of occurrence of superordinate The following examples extracted from the sample texts will illustrate how superordinates are employed: Example in text 6: The business cycle or trade cycle is a permanent feature of market economies: gross domestic product (GDP) fluctuates as booms and recessions succeed each other In the above example, the meanings of boom and recession are included in the meaning of the business cycle They are therefore the hyponyms of business cycle In the examples that follow, stock exchange is superordinate while Alternative Investment Market and Nasdaq are hyponyms of it Example in text 2: A successful, growing company can apply to a stock exchange to become a public limited company (GB) or a listed company (US) Newer and smaller companies usually join 'over-the-counter' markets, such as the Alternative Investment Market in London or Nasdaq in New York 31 Example in text 4: In 1986, the Director of the Italian Institute of Statistics calculated the size of the underground economy, and added 16.7% to Italy's gross national product (GNP figure, and then claimed that Italy had overtaken Britain to become the world's fifth largest economy Italy and Britain are hyponyms of econymy Legal ways of avoiding tax, such as these, are known as loopholes in tax laws Life insurance policies, pension plans and other investments by which individuals can postpone the payment of tax, are known as tax shelters Donations to charities that can be subtracted from the income on which tax is calculated are described as tax-deductible Loophole, tax shelter, tax-deductible all refer to legal ways of avoiding tax and they are more specific, therefore they are considered hyponyms of legal ways In spite of a small percentage of contribution to the text's lexical cohesion, superordinate plays a crucial role in making the text coherent and it implies some important pedagogical implications that will be discussed in the next chapter 2.2.2 Collocation Collocation refers to lexical cohesion that is achieved through the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur In other words, collocation is a combination of words that often go together Collocation in BE texts is analyzed by topics or "associations", the concept defined by Nguyễn Hòa (2000) Collocation in BE texts accounts for 16% equal to 113 related items out of 705 total cohesive items The distribution of collocations of the sample texts are shown as in the following table: 32 Text Collocations (%) Text 26 (17.4%) Text 18 (16.2%) Text 12 (9.7%) Text 17 (18.2%) Text 20 (16.3%) Text 20 (18.6%) Table 8: Frequency of occurrence of collocations As shown in table 8, collocation appears in every BE texts with fairly high rate in comparison with other devices The high numbers of related items in BE texts also reveal that the main idea of the texts can be grasped more easily through the examining of lexical associated items Here are the collocations identified in BE texts: Text 1: hold deposit - lend money - exchange foreign currencies - create credit - transfer money - pay money - receive deposit - liquidity - maturities - raise funds - issue securities - underwrite securities - stockbrokings - management services - deposit banking - loan banking - shares - bonds - financial conglomerate - interest rate secured loans - credit standing - blue chip borrowers - Eurocurrencies - trading currency - Eurodollars Text 2: pay debt - go bankrupt - assets liquidate - borrow capital - write documents public limited company - publicly quoted company - floating - underwrite issue new share issue - less - market price - shareowners - ownership - vote - dividend market price - nominal value Text 3: 33 issue bonds - rate(v) - bonds trade - secondary market - liquid - bond interest - tax deductible - debt-equity ratio - gilt-edged securities - bills issue - reduce money supply - increase money supply Text 4: largest market share - first - enter - succeed - lead - introduction - price promotion - increase market share - stimulate usage - second - attack - majority concentrate - market segmentation - establish - niche Text 5: debate - fairness - business profits - cheat - underground economy - undeclared no one - pay - reduce - avoid - postpone - subtract - profit tax - tax loss - tax havens - criminal - disguise - tax inspector - police - money laundering Text 6: GDP - fluctuate - boom - expand - full capacity - rise - recession - demand decline - fall - highest - peak - lowest - trough - cause - internal - self-generate external - outside - economic activities Although collocations are not used as densely as repetition, its role in helping associate the text logically and effectively is undeniable The association of words appears not only in paragraphs but also in the whole text Collocations therefore help create cohesion and coherence in the text Like superordinate, the study of collocation also includes some suggestions for teaching BE 2.2.3 Summary From the above analysis, it is concluded that repetition is used most frequently in BE texts with 48.2% of the total lexical cohesive items The remainder is distributed in other subcategories of reiteration such as: superordinate 12.8%, synonym 15.9%, antonym 7.1% and the second type of lexical cohesion, collocation accounts for 16% The fact that antonym appears with the lowest frequency in BE texts proves that antonym is a typical device that can only be employed selectively in some certain contexts to help create coherence in discourses Synonym is fairly widely used in BE texts This shows how skillful the writers of this BE course book make use of synonymous words to express the same thing to avoid 34 repetition The use of collocation and superordinate is of great importance in making the text logical and coherent, therefore interpretable with readers PART C: CONCLUSION Recapitulation It is obvious that lexical cohesion plays a very crucial part in written discourses Since a better understanding of lexical cohesion undoubtedly helps students interpret discourses, develop their vocabulary and create coherence in their writing, this study has investigated the lexical cohesive devices in the course book EBS to find out how frequently these devices occur and give some suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of BE The analysis results of the study have given the answers to all the research questions mentioned in the Introduction Part of this thesis + For the first question "What lexical cohesive devices are used in BE texts?", it can be answered that, all the types of lexical cohesion: reiteration, including repetition, synonymy, antonymy, superordinate; and collocation are common in BE texts These cohesive devices contribute significantly to the linking of sentences and meanings in a text However, the frequency of occurrence of each type is not identical in the six sample texts + For the second research question "What lexical cohesive devices are employed most frequently in BE texts?", the study results indicate that there is a tendency in using repetition in BE discourses Obviously, repetition is the most popular form of lexical reiteration in BE texts It appears with the highest frequency account for 48.2% + The research findings also reveal that some overall features of BE discourses regarding lexical cohesion are identified as follows: In BE texts, repetition is used to emphasize something important, i.e to draw reader's attention to the topic of a text In all sample texts investigated in the 35 study, most of the topic words occur repeatedly in order to create a high cohesiveness of the discourses The text is therefore coherent for readers The result also reveals that in BE texts, simple repetition is employed dominantly and that nouns and noun phrases are the most common cases of simple repetition In BE texts, while repetition is used to emphasize important conveyed information, synonymy is employed as a cohesive device to express meanings differently and therefore, avoid unnecessary repetitions In BE texts, the fact that the majority of synonyms identified falls under the categories of nouns and verbs shows that, one of the linguistic features of BE texts which is determined by the particular purpose of it is introducing key economic terms and clarifying business and economic concepts Nouns and verb phrases are used synonymously in BE discourses to help create clarity, precision and unambiguity of the texts Similarly, the use of antonyms in BE texts help explain the terms and notions more easily by observing the contrary relations among word pairs, emerging the main idea of each paragraph and the topic of the whole text Hence, it makes the text more comprehensible for readers The fact that BE texts includes numerous generalizations of business and economic concepts has explained why relational antonyms are used more frequently than contrary antonyms However, in some texts, no contrary and relational antonym is found The contrastive meanings of word pairs help express distinctive notions inside the discourse and thus, clarify the difficult economic concepts Repetition, synonymy and antonymy are reiterated devices that help create the coherence of BE texts Similarly, superordinate and collocation are effective ways to create connections among words, phrases, paragraphs and the whole BE text They link words and ideas of a BE text in a logical way therefore create coherence and thus comprehensibility of the text In other words, the more related lexical items are used the more cohesiveness of the text they create For example, the sample text in this study is considered the most cohesive one because it has the highest frequency of lexical ties of all BE sample texts In 36 particular, each category of cohesion appears in this text with the most or the second most dense distribution (see appendix VII) Additionally, from the above concluding remarks, some suggestions to assist reading and writing are made as in the following part Pedagogical implications Since the interpretation, particularly the interpretation of written discourses is a process that occurs within the learners That is, the embedded information in the discourses that the writer communicates to the readers must be received by the learners And this comprehension can only be achieved by good knowledge of the world, the field, the experience and ability of the readers to infer the purposes of the discourse This is especially true with ESP as ESP is a combination of subject matter and English language When reading, students have to rely greatly on their background knowledge of their major to comprehend ESP texts Therefore, teachers should remind them of the important role of specialized knowledge in helping them to learn ESP Moreover, the teacher should always be a good companion of the students who is ready to provide them with sufficient knowledge of English to support their ESP learning The study gives some pedagogical implications concerning lexical cohesion as follows: Collocation Due to its high cohesiveness, collocation should be paid central attention Collocation appears quite often in BE texts, however, learning it is not an easy task as Vân has stated in his book Introducing Discourse Analysis (2006) that: "Collocation can cause major problems for discourse analysis because it includes all those items in a discourse that are semantically related In some cases this makes it difficult to decide for certain whether a cohesive relationship exists or not The main problem is that collocation is expressed through open rather than closed class items Furthermore, there is no limit to the items that can be used to express collocation This means that it is difficult to establish sets of regularly cooccurring words and phrases." 37 Another problem is concerning lexical relationships Words and phrases that are considered related in one text may not be related in others For example, the words dog and friend are not related at all But in the following example, they are supposedly synonymous: My wife bought a nice little dog last month The dog is her best friend From the above reasons, in exploiting collocation in BE reading and writing activities, teachers should set up learning tasks such as: - identify the possibility of the co-occur tendency of some certain words in BE discourses, - find the topic of the reading texts through the elicited sequence of related words, - make use of collocations in reading text to write a passage which is cohesive and coherent, - summarize the paragraph or the whole text using given collocations, - translate the passage into the source language It should be noted that during translating task students should be aware of collocations, in particular, the meaning of a collocation should be taken into account instead of the dictionary meaning of the individual words This therefore dissuades them from word-by-word translating or mistranslating More importantly, further exercises on collocation can be designed by teachers to check students' comprehension of the text, for example: "Match up the verbs and nouns below to make common collocations", "Read the following text and write a short heading for each paragraph", "There is a logical connection among three or four words in each of the following groups Which is the odd one out, and why?" 38 For learners, collocation also helps them greatly in learning vocabulary Particularly, new vocabulary can be more easily remembered when it is learned in its context, i.e in collocation relations As a result, new vocabulary can be recalled at any time and retained in learners for a long time In addition, learners should be encouraged to use dictionary of collocation especially when they writing and translating tasks Hence, collocation helps enlarge the vocabulary of students Repetition It is concluded that repetition is a cohesive device that is used most frequently in BE As mention in Chapter II, repetition device is used when the writer wants to make focus on a definite topic The identity of repeated words and phrases are very easy for learners as they can be observed during reading process Teachers simply mention or ask students to elicit the most repeated items in the whole text to guess the topic of it This helps students greatly in interpreting the text Limitations of the study Due to time constraint and minor framework of the research, the author was not able to carry out the investigation into different aspects of cohesions Actually, this study only focuses on analyzing diverse types of lexical cohesive ties without examining the grammatical cohesion devices, which may results in a incomprehension of cohesion in BE discourses It is also regrettable that the small number of sample texts may not help create the most valid analytical results The results of the study are therefore not very persuasive Lastly, the limited knowledge about business and economics area and the inexperience of the author in implementing research may not lead to the expected results Recommendations for further studies From the mentioned limitations, some suggestions for further studies are inferred as follows: 39 • Further investigations into other cohesive devices such as: grammatical, topical and logical cohesion of BE written discourses to improve the teaching and learning of BE • Further researches on evaluating the affects of cohesive devices knowledge on the students' abilities in learning writing and reading BE discourses • Further researches on the causes of common errors made by BE learners when using cohesive devices to create and interpret BE discourses and solutions for it Finally, this study is only the author's initial attempt in studying BE discourses but it is expected that it could support the author, teachers and students in their teaching and learning of business and economic discourses Due to the limited time and knowledge, shortcomings in the study are unavoidable Consequently, all suggestions and comments from readers are highly appreciated 40 REFERENCES Brown, G & G Yule (1983) Discourse Analysis Cambridge: CUP Crystal, D (1992) Introducing Linguistics London: Penguin Eggins, S (1994) An Introduction to Systematic Functional Linguistics London Continuum Halliday, M.A.K (1994), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edition, London: Edward Arnold Halliday, M.A.K & Hasan, R (1976) Cohesion in English London: Longman Hasan, R (1984) Coherence and Cohesive Harmony London: Longman Hoa, N (2000), An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, Vietnam National University Press Hoa, N (2004) Understanding English Semantics, Vietnam National University Press Hoey, M (1991) Patterns of Lexis in Text Oxford: Oxford University Press 10 Ian MacKenzie (2002) English for Business Studies Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 11 Nunan, D (1993) Introducing Discourse Analysis London: Penguin English 12 Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (2000) Oxford University Press 13 Oxford Collocation Dictionary (2002) Oxford: Oxford University Press 14 Palmer, J A (1983b) Getting into Text: Coherence in Cross Currents X2 15 Salkie, R (1995) Text and Discourse Analysis London: Routledge 16 Tanskanen, S (1984) Collaborating towards Coherence John Benjamins Publishing Company 41 17 Thompson, G (1996) Introducing Functional Grammar New York: Oxford University Press 18 Van, H V (2006) Introducing Discourse Analysis Hanoi: Educational Publishing House ... another bank account - often by way of a bank transfer or a cheque (check) rather than the use of notes and coins Investment banks, often called merchant banks in Britain, raise funds for industry... about order and unity and emphasis" Coherence can obtain on the basis of relevance, the co-operative principle, the common shared background knowledge between participants in a speech event, and... item refers back to another, to which it is related by having a common referent Reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which comprises of the repetition of a lexical item to refer back to a