Corpus based investigating of cohessive patern in scientific discourse in persian: Applied approach in teaching persian for academic purposes

Research shows that scientific language, in addition to having specific vocabulary, has syntactic and structural features that distinguish it from general language. Academic texts play an important role in identifying these features and extracting frequency patterns from linguistic structures. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the patterns of cohesion in accordance with the Systemic Functional Grammar with the aim of application in Persian language teaching for academic purposes. So a corpus of academic texts in the two disciplines of social sciences and biology, which consisted of a volume of 21133 and 19131 words, respectively, were chosen and the patterns were extracted. The results showed that at the lexical level, the elements of repetition, collocation, hyponymy, semantic opposition and synonymy and at the grammatical level, the elements of reference, substitution and deletion are among the factors of cohesion in scientific Persian texts. The other results showed that, in general, in scientific Persian language, lexical elements play a greater role in the cohesion of texts than grammatical elements. It was also found that at the lexical level, the two elements of collocation and repetition in the social sciences and biology texts, respectively, and at the grammatical level, the two elements of personal reference in the social science texts and reference references in biology are the most used. Another result was fewer uses of the element of deletion in both scientific texts than other elements. In the end, frequency pattern of cohesive elements obtained in each scientific type was determined. It seems that these patterns can be used in compiling Persian language teaching books for academic purposes and teaching writing at advanced level.
Extended Abstract:
In recent years, with the growth and spread of Persian language in universities and the establishment of domestic and foreign educational centers, the field of Persian language teaching for non-Persian speakers and related issues has received more attention in scientific circles than before. One of the educational courses in this field is Persian for academic purposes. Learners are taught this language in the form of academic texts to prepare them for the educational content of the university and to provide them with the necessary language skills to understand it. They learn the content and writing of these texts. In other words, this type of education is planned with the aim of filling the gap between the ability to read and write general Persian texts and the ability to read and write scientific texts. On the other hand, studies that have analyzed the written discourse in various scientific texts in English confirm this importance. The nature of writing and text structure in scientific language is different from general, literary, and colloquial language and has been described with features such as special grammar, strong and interconnected structure, and different writing style and style. Therefore, it is easy to think that scientific language is only in the field of technical vocabulary and terms, which are different from non-scientific language. Due to the special structure and writing style of scientific language, an important goal of teaching Persian for academic purposes is also to pay attention to the quality of the texts taught and their adaptation to the textual features of scientific types. In Persian, it seems necessary to pay attention not only to technical words and terms. Now the question arises what features of the scientific Persian language should be taken into account and taught when writing instructional texts for academic purposes.
Research Question:
What are the elements of textual cohesion in social science and academic biology texts, and what is the difference between them?
Methodology:
After purposeful selection of books that met the conditions described in the previous section, six books were randomly selected, three books in social sciences and three books in biology, and the number of paragraphs in each and as The total was calculated. The point that distinguishes the present study from other studies in the field of analysis of written scientific genre in Persian is the acceptable volume of data and attention to the fact that in most studies without the use of special tables to determine the volume of statistical sample and quite a taste has been chosen for the volume of the sculpture, and this volume is very low in some, and at the same time the result obtained in the end from the features of the scientific language is generalized to other contents in the same way. in the present study, we tried according to Krejcie and Morgan (1970) table and according to the total number of paragraphs in academic books, in three social science textbooks, which were 905 paragraphs, respectively, 90 paragraphs from each book. That is, finally, we will analyze 270 paragraphs of social science textbooks. Also, in three biology textbooks with 715 paragraphs, we analysed 82 paragraphs from each book(246 paragraphs totally). Therefore, the corpus of social sciences included a total of 21,133 words and 858 sentences and the corpus of biology was 19191 words with 695 sentences.
The cohesion factors in each sentence were manually labeled, and also, the types of each were determined in the sentences. At the end of the tagging, some paragraphs were randomly selected and re-examined by another person who was sufficiently skilled in analyzing the cohesion factors, and the tagging errors were corrected.
The percentage of agreement in these codings was 91%. Therefore, it can be said that the obtained data were reliable. After performing the qualitative analysis steps, in quantitative analysis, the frequency or frequency of the presence of different factors in both parts of the corpus (social sciences and biology) was examined and displayed in the form of diagrams; According to the purpose of the study, one-way chi-square were used to examine the elements of cohesion in any scientific species and two-way chi-square test was used to compare elements between two scientific species in SPSS software version 26.
Results:
In the present study, after determining the frequency of lexical and grammatical cohesion elements and related subcategories, a test was performed to determine the randomness or significance of the differences. It was concluded that in both scientific species, the studied bodies have a significant difference between frequency and distribution of elements of cohesion. Then, patterns were extracted from the use of these elements in any scientific type and their practical priority. These patterns show that in Persian language scientific texts in social sciences and biology written by Persian speakers, lexical elements are used more than grammatical elements and they have a greater role in cohesion of scientific texts. This result is consistent with the results of Zare (2010) and Armion (2004) who examined the elements of cohesion in texts from agricultural textbooks and high school chemistry texts, respectively. A common model can also be assumed for the practical priority of five general categories of cohesion, which are as follows:
Vocabulary cohesion> Grammatical reference> Grammatical substitution> Grammatical omission
The important point in the above prioritization is the less use of the elimination element and its types compared to other categories of cohesion. This feature is found in the present study, according to Haghshenas (2005), Pakrah (2014), Armion (2004) and Zare (2010). This finding shows that since in scientific texts, verbal clarity has an important role in the exchange of information and concepts to the audience, this element is not used much compared to other elements of cohesion. Therefore, the authors of Persian language textbooks for academic Scientific purposes should pay attention to the fact that in order not to create structural ambiguity and also to completely transfer the Scientific concepts, the proper use of these types of cohesive elements should be chosen carefully