TEXTUAL COHESION BETWEEN GRAMMATICAL ORGANIZATION AND SEMANTIC STRUCTURE AND ITS ROLE IN ENHANCING TEXT COMPREHENSION SKILLS AMONG LEARNERS OF A SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE: AN INTERTEXTUAL STUDY

Abstract

This study examines textual cohesion (Textual Cohesion) as a central phenomenon in text linguistics and a foundational pillar of textual studies. It addresses two essential dimensions of language analysis and learning: the formal (structural) dimension and the semantic dimension. The formal dimension is realized through syntactic and structural organization, whereas the semantic dimension is concerned with the flow of meaning and the construction of pragmatic significance in accordance with grammatical structuring.

Textual cohesion serves as the integrative mechanism that harmonizes these two dimensions. It organizes syntactic structures and generates from them a coherent, fully developed semantic and pragmatic meaning. On this basis, the study provides a theoretical grounding of textual cohesion, identifies its tools and mechanisms, and explores ways of employing it in structuring the teaching process, along with proposing instructional strategies for effective language teaching.

Presenting this phenomenon as a pedagogical mechanism enhances the effectiveness of educational programs, with the aim of moving learners from a limited, sentence-bound framework to a broader level characterized by communicative competence and improved reading comprehension. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this text-based approach, the researcher conducted an empirical application involving students at both the intermediate level (third intermediate) and the secondary level (first and second secondary).

The findings reveal that a significant proportion of learners lack foundational knowledge of text linguistics, which necessitates revising current educational programs and advancing them from sentence-based instruction to text-based instruction. The study concludes that the ultimate goal of language teaching is communication, and that teaching isolated sentences outside their social and textual contexts neither benefits learners nor fulfills instructional objectives. At best, sentence-level instruction serves as an introductory stage suitable for early learning, but it is insufficient for intermediate and advanced levels, where text-based instruction becomes essential.