Reading for pleasure is a reliable step towards acquiring cohesive markers A Content Analysis Study

This research has considered two significant motifs in second language learning, extensive reading and cohesive markers. According to (Day & Bamford, ۲۰۰۲, p.۱), "Extensive reading is an approach to language teaching in which learners learn much easy material in the new language." It has been perceived as a highly effective method for improving learners' second language learning for several decades. The second subject, cohesive markers, refers to a subcategory of interactive markers that support the reader to make the internal connection and signal to the reader what the relationships between the different clauses, sentences, and paragraphs are. This study tries to show that learners can acquire appropriate use of cohesive markers through extensive reading. To this end, we randomly selected four storybooks as our corpus. We counted these markers' frequencies in the corpus, which contained (۱۴۲۴۶۸) words through the Wordsmith app. We make clear that some categories of cohesive markers are identical in all four books, but the frequencies are not the same, especially in the last book. These differences are due to variations in the writers' writing style. From this and similar researches, we concluded that through extensive reading, learners provide enough input that is comprehensible, interesting for them, which makes second language acquisition easy. Krashen (۱۹۸۲) believed that learning for pleasure leads to an unconscious procedure for acquiring language, which is more effective than conscious learning.

Keywords:

extensive reading , metadiscourse , interactive dimensions , cohesive markers , storybook