Lexical Cohesion in National and International English Newspapers

This study examined the use of lexical cohesion in English political news articles published in national and international English newspapers. To achieve this goal, a corpus of news articles in 40,000 words (20,000 in each corpus) were randomly selected from political news articles published in international English newspapers (e.g. the Washington post, the New York times) and local English newspapers (e.g. Iran Daily, Tehran times) from January to December 2017. The data were analyzed based on Tanskanen’s (2006) classification of lexical cohesion. Results displayed that a number of 1726 lexical cohesions was used in national English news articles and a number of 1689 lexical cohesion was found in international English news articles. The findings showed variations in the use of collocation and reiteration in the two corpora. Moreover, international English newspaper used more substitution, equivalence, contrast, activity related, and elaborative collocation, while the national English corpus used more simple repetition, complex repetition, generalization, specification, co-specification, and order set collocation. Moreover, there was a significant difference between the two corpora in the use of the subset of reiteration and collocation such as equivalence, generalization, specification, contrast, and activity related collocation. The findings of this study can benefit both English language teaching and learning in the classroom. It is suggested that lexical cohesion be taught in English language classroom to enhance language learners’ reading ability

کلیدواژه ها:

Collocation ، Lexical cohesion ، Newspaper article ، Political discourse ، Reiteration