Conjunctive Ties in Conference Proceedings of EFL Persian Graduate Students

This paper presents the findings of a research on academic writings of Persian scholars in English language with focus on conjunctive ties used in the proceedings of a conference. Basing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1994; Halliday Matthiessen 2004) as theoretical framework, this study investigates conjunctive devices which are one of the main devices of cohesion making in academic writings. Frequency of occurrences of the three categories of conjunctions (Extension, Elaboration, and Enhancement) was investigated and comparisons were made between the two groups of Persian who are studying in Iranian and Malaysian universities at graduate levels. Although there were some variations in the distribution of conjunctives used by the two groups of Persians, they were not distinctively different regarding employment of conjunctive relations intheir conference proceedings. In comparison with other ESL/EFL users of English, Persian scholars revealed similarities with small variations that could be traced which are mainly because of their mother tongue backgrounds.