Cohesive Devices and Referencing

Hello again. Now in this final lecture of section for structuring the response we’re going to look at cohesive devices and referencing or in other words how to link stages data and sentences together with appropriate language and improve our sense of cohesion. Again if we return to the band descriptors we can see that in order to achieve a band 7 as we would like the band descript to state that our task Gorme response must use a range of cohesive devices appropriately although there may be some under or over use now slipping to a band 6. We can see that the response uses cohesive devices effectively but cohesion within and or between sentences may be faulty or mechanical. In essence if you do not use cohesive devices you will not go get any more than a band 5 for coherence and cohesion. And if you do not use cohesive devices accurately or appropriately you can’t score more than a band 6 so these pieces of language are incredibly important within or between sentences. This is crucial because it’s not just looking at joining sentences together but also joining the ideas within the sentence together. So first of all let’s ask the question what are cohesive devices. Now I want you to read a paragraph here for a task one response and see if you can identify all the cohesive devices looking at the details. Just over half of all boys from 10 to 15 shots on the Internet during school days with about 25 percent spending less than an hour. However almost 70 percent of girls enjoy this activity and as many as nearly 10 percent spend over four hours chatting online. So where are the creative devices here. So have a look at another one. In contrast playing on games consoles is far more popular among boys than girls with about 85 percent of boys playing daily compared to just over 50 percent of girls. Of those who play video games whereas the majority of boys play between 1 and 3 hours the largest proportion of girls play for less than an hour. Again where are the cohesive devices here. This have a look. Looking at the details However in contrast of those who play video games that one’s a little bit different. Now all of these are looking at transitions between sentences or between paragraphs which we mentioned on the previous slide that said all of these are looking at transitions between ideas between sentences. However we also have cohesive devices within sentences. So with about 25 percent spending and as many as nearly 10 percent spend whereas. So the language above helps us to build a sense of cohesion within and between sentences without this language. The transitions between ideas would be very mechanical. It would be sloppy it would be inaccurate it would be jarring and that would disrupt the flow of the response. So we need language like this to improve our sense of cohesion. Let’s have a look at some useful cohesive devices for when we want to transition between sentences. Now I’m not going to read everything out here. What I would want you to do is perhaps pause the video maybe screen shot this video which just contains all of the different kinds of devices that we can use for different purposes. Opening a paragraph linking stages suggesting contrast adding in other points and also for within sentences to link stages to suggest contrast. To add another point and you can try practicing these in your responses. Let’s have a look at cohesive devices in use. So using the language that we’ve looked at let’s try to make the following comparative graph paragraph more cohesive cohesive devices. So here it is without cohesive devices. In Yemen in 2000 half of the population consisted of the youngest age bracket the middle and eldest age groups came in second and third position. Forty six point three percent and 3.6 percent respectively. In 2050 the 60 plus year olds are predicted to maintain that position with 5.7 percent of the population. The 15 to 59 year olds are forecast to overtake the youngest group by 20 percent. Gramma’s great vocabulary is great addressing the course requirements but there’s very little cohesion here. So let’s see if we can improve this with regards to Yemen in 2000. Half of the population consisted of the youngest age bracket with the middle and eldest age groups coming in second and third position in 2050. The 60 plus year olds are predicted to maintain their position with 5.7 percent. However the 15 to 59 year olds are forecast to overtake the youngest group by 20 percent. Notice we’re not using too many cohesive devices. Don’t want to overuse. Be careful of overuse. Have a look again at a detailed paragraph or cross the Trent the red meats beef and lamb both showed down with trends. Beef consumption began at around 220 grams. Beef consumption then fluctuated for a decade. Then there was a decrease to about 110 grams in 2004. The amount of lamb eaten had fallen from 150 in 1979 to approximately 60 grams by 2004. And good language no sense of cohesion. Maybe we could use some stage language here to improve cohesion. If we look at the red meats cetra regarding beef consumption began at around 220 grams before fluctuating for a decade. This was followed by a gradual decrease. Similarly the amount of Lambertson had fallen. So you can see the reason we using these cohesive devices again. Not too many. Notice the grass with the trend feature. Much more stage linking language and comparative graphs do so that might be quite useful when you consider what type of task you have. Finally let’s have a look at referencing referencing is the ability to refer back to previous ideas without necessarily using the same language. This is especially important in task one because without referencing we would end up repeating ourselves quite a lot. So can an example beef consumption began at 200 grams before rising quickly to 400 grams. Consumption them fell to 300 grams. Let’s improve this little stretch of language with some referencing this figure then fell to 300 grams really quickly. With hardly anything changed we’ve changed the repetitive nature of this language by using a demonstrated pronoun this. Now this is an example of referencing. Let’s look a couple more examples not with damaged itive pronouns but with something a little bit different. First of all let’s look at the former and the latter so we can avoid repetition and improved cohesion with these expressions. Have a look at an example. England and Denmark both had approval ratings of 45 percent in 1990 but whereas the former fell to just 20 percent in 1995 the latter surged 80 percent. So we’re using the former to refer back to the first category in our list of two and we’re using the lesser to refer to the second category in our list of two. So with the former first England and the latter refers to Denmark. This enables us to avoid repeating England and Denmark and saving a lot of time as well. The other thing we can do is use the term respectively says another very handy way of avoiding repetition and saving time particularly when presenting multiple points of information. So we need to use the word respectively which essentially means according to the previous order. Let’s have a look at an example. In 1995 the approval ratings of England and Denmark were 20 percent and 80 percent respectively. This is a very simple example. You can see that England relates to 20 percent whereas Denmark relate to 80 percent because that’s the order in which they were written.