Cohesive devices in the compositions of English language teacher trainees in Tanzania

This study investigates how Tanzanian English language teacher trainees use cohesive devices in academic writing. Compositions written by teacher trainees provided data for a qualitative analysis and interpretation. Random sampling helped choose twenty participants from Bunda teachers’ college who wrote two compositions each. Forty teacher trainers’ compositions were collected and analyzed by the researchers to identify the types, frequency and manner of use of cohesive devices by teacher trainees in their writing. The results indicate that teacher trainees use a variety of lexical and grammatical cohesive devices. Particularly the teacher trainees widely use five types of lexical cohesive devices, namely repetition, synonyms, antonymy, hyponyms, and collocations. They also used four types of grammatical cohesive devices, namely reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunctions with reference devices being the most frequently cohesive devices used. Furthermore, the findings show that the English language teacher trainees misuse certain types of cohesive devices such as conjuctions and the definite article. The implication of this study suggested for reference cohesion to be taught to the students and avoid misuse of certain types of cohesive devices to enhance better flow in writing. The findings may benefit linguists and scholars interested in understanding the use of cohesive devices in writing in English as a Foreign Language.