Cohesive Devices Across Disciplines: A Contrastive Study of Academic Writing Practices by Native English and Arab Writers in Education and Medicine

The present research studied the disciplinary use of cohesive devices across academic writing, comparing Native English Writers (NEW) with Arab Writers of English (AEW). It centers around the research articles in the fields of Medicine and Education. The researchers adopted corpus-based analysis, presented by Halliday and Hasan s framework, 1976, in the exploration of cohesive device types—grammar and lexical ones—while considering frequencies along with discourse contexts. The results indicated significant disciplinary differences in cohesive strategies use among the NEW, i.e. additive conjunctions, which appear in the educational writing and facilitate argument development and logical flow between ideas (e.g., and, further); the collocations in medical writing reflect the exactitude of the subject and clarity to be expected in any sort of scientific discourse, no less with causal conjunctions. AEW also exhibited discipline-specific patterns, but their cohesive strategies are colored by the Arabic rhetorical traditions. AEW in education relied heavily on repetition to achieve thematic unity, which sometimes results in redundancy by the norms of English academic writing. AEW in medicine make more use of additive and causal conjunctions to achieve logical relations, although overuse sometimes led to long, unwieldy sentences. These findings have significant pedagogical implications for EAP instruction. They call for training in cohesive strategies specific to disciplines, especially for learners from an Arab background, as this helps learners adjust their writing practices in ways that will meet expectations in the English academic conventions while managing cultural influences.