A Discourse Analysis of Formal Links Used in English Texts in National High School Entrance Exams

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Language is a magical key that human beings hold in their hands to open the door of communication. To succeed in communication, formal links are one of the aspects of language that need to be known and used in discourse in addition to the contextual factors (Cook, 1992). Hence, systematic exposure to them is essential for satisfactory language acquisition, and assessment should be in line with this as well. Consequently, this study aimed to reveal whether a national exam English as a foreign language (EFL) learners take include these links. Based on this purpose, English texts taking place in the last five years’ national high school exams (LGS) held in Turkey annually were analyzed by the discourse analytical framework of formal links suggested by Cook (1992) as a part of the qualitative design. The analysis indicated that the types of formal links included in majority of the exams were found to be verb forms, parallelism, referring expressions, repetition, ellipsis, and conjunction. Moreover, outnumbering uses of referring expressions and the infrequency of substitution were revealed. In the light of these findings, high school EFL teachers and the material developers in the ministry were suggested to include different types of formal links in their lessons/materials more frequently so that students could internalize such aspects of language at early stages of their EFL learning process and be one step closer to a balanced acquisition process.