| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系 === 105 === As English is used as a lingua franca (ELF) in academic contexts, students around the world are often requested to present, discuss, and respond to others in English in higher education. As Halliday and Hasan (1976) pointed out, cohesive devices are the essential elements in cohesion of both written and spoken discourses. Previous literature mostly focused on the use of cohesive devices among different levels of writers and the cohesive features in undergraduates’ writing. Not much effort has been put into how cohesive devices are used in academic oral presentations. This study therefore investigates how cohesive devices, specifically, conjunctive devices “and, so, but, and because” were used in academic presentations among three groups of ELF speakers: presentations made by ELF scholars in an English-speaking country (the JSCC group from the John Swales Conference Corpus), by EFL scholars in a non-English country (the ESP group in an international conference in Taiwan) and by international IMBA students (the IMBA group in a Taiwanese university). The results show additive conjunction and was the most frequently employed one among the four, followed by so, but and because. The results also show that under the category of additive conjunctive device, and is used for topic extension and focus shifting primarily in the speaking environment. And is also used as a temporal device. In addition, the causal conjunctive device, so, also serves as an additive for topic extension and focus shifting in speakers’ presentations. Due to the semantic meaning of but and because, they are not applied as frequently as and and so. Compared to the other groups, the IMBA group tended to overuse and. The ESP group used so the most while the JSCC group followed a more even distribution pattern among all connective devices. The results of the study may offer language instructors in tertiary level some ideas about the use of conjunctive devices among novice presenters and provide instructive suggestions for developing teaching activities to assist novice presenters to deliver more cohesive presentations.
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