Types of Cohesive Devices in the Written Texts of Learners of English in Selected Secondary Schools in West Pokot County, Kenya
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Date
2025-06
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CEDRED
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This paper examines written texts from 40 form four secondary school students in West Pokot County with a view to determining the types of cohesive devices used. Written texts can only be meaningful when they are coherent. To achieve coherence, writers must select the most appropriate cohesive devices. Despite the significant effort made by teachers of English in equipping learners with a variety of cohesive tools, many students still struggle to apply the knowledge learnt in the classroom in their written work. Consequently, written texts from many learners of English lack coherence hence, a need for targeted educational interventions. Using stratified random sampling, the study sampled 40 Form Four students from four different school clusters, namely national, extra-county, county, and sub-county schools. Data collection involved essay writing to assess students' knowledge and application of cohesive devices. Halliday and Hasan's (1976) Model of Cohesion provided the theoretical background for this study. The model categorizes grammatical coherence into four major classes: Reference, Substitution, Ellipsis, and Conjunction. This article focuses on Conjunctions. There are four types of conjunctions namely, Additive, Adversative, Causal and Temporal. Additive Conjunctions are sub-categorized into 5 typologies (Simple, Complex Emphatic, Complex De-Emphatic, Appositional and Comparison). This study sought to find out to what extent these five types of additive conjunctions are used in the written texts of form four students in West Pokot County. Our results demonstrate that only one type of additive (Simple) is popular with students from the four school clusters (i.e. national, extra-county, county, and sub-county). The other four advanced types of Additive Conjunctions are rarely used by students in West Pokot County, probably because they lack mastery in them. We recommend that teachers and curriculum developers should put more emphasis on these four types of additive conjunctions, when it comes to the teaching of cohesive devices. This will aid in making students’ written texts more coherent thus enhancing their communication skills in the English language
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Odari, G & Kebeya, H. (2025). Onsongo, S. K; Aunga, D & Gitonga, N. (2025). Types of Cohesive Devices in the Written Texts of Learners of English in Selected Secondary Schools in West Pokot County, Kenya.. Journal of African Interdisciplinary Studies, 9(6), 82 – 92.