Exploring the cohesive devices in written and spoken texts of “Let’s Learn Persian” based on Halliday and Hassan's (1976) model

Research literature has so far focused on representing cohesive devices in various language instruction texts based on Halliday and Hassan's (1976) Systemic Functional Grammar. However, these studies restricted themselves to identifying only one or two cohesive devices in these texts. Hence, studies need to adopt a practical comprehensive framework which would cover all cohesive devices especially in Persian language instruction texts. Through an in-depth contrastive analysis, this study aimed to address the relationship between the frequency of cohesive devices in written and spoken texts of “Let's learn Persian” textbook and the difficulty level of its texts. The textbook series authored by Zolfaghari, Ghaffari, and Mahmoodi Bakhtiari (2008) includes three main levels: elementary, intermediate, and advanced. They were selected since they had both written and spoken texts. Nine written and spoken texts in each level (in total 27 written and 27 spoken texts) were selected through systematic random sampling. Having categorized and codified the selected texts, researchers analyzed the data quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data indicated that both written and spoken texts of “Let's Learn Persian” textbook had various cohesive devices. As higher level texts were presupposed as more difficult ones, frequency of lexical cohesion, reference, ellipsis and conjunction increased in the higher level written texts. It can be argued that there existed a significant relationship between the frequency of the mentioned cohesive devices and difficulty level of written texts. There was no significant relationship between substitution frequency and difficulty level of the texts. The frequency analysis of cohesive devices in spoken texts of all levels showed that there existed significant relations between conjunction, lexical cohesion, and text difficulty....