Noun cohesion in narratives written by basque students

Abstract

This paper analyses the noun cohesion in narratives written in Basque by young students of compulsory education (primary and secondary) and by teacher training. The aim is to identify the differences that appear in each level in order to provide data that allow teachers to design more appropriate didactic resources and interventions for each educational level. A corpus of 80 written texts among four groups of 20 students is studied, being each student from a different academic level: 6th grade of primary school, 2nd and 4th grade of secondary school and first year of Teacher Training Formation. All the texts, 1 per student, are produced based on the same consignment. After a detailed analysis of the anaphoric procedures used and their relation with the non-verbal level of the narrations, it is stated that varied procedures appear and are consolidated from the age of 11. The observed regularities in the nominal cohesion seem to be indicatives of the characteristics of the textual genre itself. Moreover, it is observed that the difficulties are present in all groups and there is not continuous progression from one group to another. Moreover, it is observed that the emergence of some anaphoric procedures or others do not depend so much on the age as they do on the representations the subjects have among the communicative situation.