When you read a well-written paragraph, you rarely stop to ask yourself, “How does this sentence connect to the previous one?” The transition just feels natural. That seamless flow is not accidental – it is the result of deliberate linguistic tools known as textual cohesion devices. These devices are the structural glue of any written text. They link sentences, clauses, and paragraphs into a unified whole, allowing readers to track ideas, follow arguments, and build meaning across a passage. For students learning to read analytically, recognizing these devices is one of the most powerful comprehension skills they can develop.
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What is textual cohesion?
Textual cohesion refers to the network of linguistic connections that hold a text together. It is a semantic concept – meaning it deals with relationships of meaning within a text rather than surface-level grammar alone. Halliday and Hasan’s landmark 1976 work Cohesion in English remains the foundational reference on this topic. They defined cohesion as arising when the interpretation of one element in a text depends on another – when one word or phrase cannot be fully understood without reference to something else in the same text. This interdependence between elements, they argued, is what gives a text its texture, distinguishing it from a random collection of sentences.
It is important to distinguish cohesion from coherence. Cohesion refers to the explicit linguistic markers in the text – the actual words and structures used to connect ideas. Coherence is the broader logical organisation of meaning that a reader constructs in their mind. Research in discourse psychology confirms that cohesion supports coherence: the more cohesive a text is, the more readily a reader can build a coherent mental model of its meaning.
The five major categories of cohesion devices
Halliday and Hasan identified five broad categories of cohesive devices: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. The first three – reference, substitution, and ellipsis – are primarily grammatical. Conjunction combines grammatical and lexical features, while lexical cohesion operates through vocabulary alone. Together, these five categories cover nearly every mechanism a writer uses to connect parts of a text.
Reference
Reference is the most frequently used cohesion device. It occurs when a word or phrase in a text points to another word or phrase – either earlier or later – to complete its meaning. The most common reference items are pronouns (he, she, it, they, this, that) and definite articles. Consider: Riya opened the book. She read it for an hour. Here, “she” refers back to “Riya” and “it” refers back to “the book.” Without this referential link, each sentence would stand isolated.
Reference can be anaphoric (pointing backward to something already mentioned) or cataphoric (pointing forward to something about to be introduced). Anaphoric reference is far more common in written texts. For instance, replacing “the teacher” with “he” or “two students” with “they” in a subsequent sentence is classic anaphoric reference. Cataphoric reference, on the other hand, creates anticipation – as in: Here is the solution: revise your work carefully. The word “solution” is introduced before it is explained. Research from Keys to Literacy notes that students who struggle to resolve pronoun reference – to identify what “he,” “they,” or “it” actually refers to – consistently make more comprehension errors on inference-based questions.
Substitution
Substitution involves replacing a word, phrase, or clause with a substitute item to avoid repetition while maintaining the link between ideas. The substitute item holds the same structural position in the sentence as the original. There are three types: nominal substitution (using “one” or “ones”), verbal substitution (using “do”), and clausal substitution (using “so” or “not”). Example: She wanted a window seat. I preferred one near the aisle. Here, “one” substitutes for “a window seat,” keeping the connection clear without restating the full noun phrase. Glottopedia’s analysis of Halliday and Hasan’s framework points out that substitution brings variety and semantic authenticity to a text while locking its cohesive structure into a unified whole.
Ellipsis
Ellipsis is sometimes described as “substitution by zero” – an item that is structurally required is simply left out because it can be inferred from the context. Example: Mary ate some biscuits, and Robert [ate] some cake. The verb “ate” is omitted in the second clause because it is already understood from the first. Like substitution, ellipsis can be nominal, verbal, or clausal. Where there is ellipsis, there is presupposition – the reader is expected to supply the missing element from what has already been said. Ellipsis makes texts more concise and natural, but it also places cognitive demands on the reader, who must actively hold prior information in working memory to fill the gap.
Conjunction
Conjunction is the device most directly visible to readers. It uses connecting words and phrases to signal the logical relationship between ideas. Conjunctions do not simply join sentences – they define the relationship between them. There are four main types of conjunctive relations:
- Additive: adds information – and, also, furthermore, in addition
- Adversative: introduces contrast or concession – but, however, although, nevertheless
- Causal: signals cause, reason, or result – because, therefore, so, consequently
- Temporal: marks time and sequence – then, after, meanwhile, finally
Research from Learning Focused illustrates how these “small words” carry enormous interpretive weight. In the sentences Maria practiced every afternoon. However, she did not make the team. Therefore, she decided to work harder and try again next year, a student who misses “however” and “therefore” will completely reverse the meaning – concluding that Maria made the team, when the opposite is true. A study published in Psychological Research demonstrated that lowering cohesion in a text – specifically by altering connectives and removing anaphoric markers – produced a significant 25% drop in readers’ recall performance, even when the actual content of the text remained unchanged.
Lexical cohesion
Lexical cohesion is the only category that operates purely through vocabulary. It works when words in different parts of a text are semantically related, creating links through meaning rather than grammar. According to Halliday and Hasan, lexical cohesion falls into two broad types: reiteration and collocation. Reiteration includes the repetition of the same word, or the use of a synonym, near-synonym, antonym, hyponym (a more specific term), or general noun. Collocation refers to words that typically co-occur in a given subject domain – such as “patient,” “diagnosis,” “treatment,” and “recovery” in a medical text – which hold the text together through shared semantic field.
For example, in a passage about climate change, a writer might use “global warming,” “rising temperatures,” “heat,” and “thermal expansion” across different sentences. None of these are identical, yet all are semantically linked, and this network of related vocabulary creates cohesion. Research on lexical cohesion in reading comprehension confirms that training students to track these repetition patterns – especially synonym chains – significantly improves their ability to identify main ideas and answer inference questions.
Why cohesion devices matter for reading comprehension
Reading comprehension is not simply decoding words – it is the construction of a coherent mental representation of a text’s meaning. As reading researcher Timothy Shanahan explains on Reading Rockets, readers do not store text verbatim in memory; they translate what they read into a mental model, and that translation requires recognising and using the cohesive devices an author has built into the text. When those devices are missed, the reader’s mental model becomes fragmented or distorted.
Academic research confirms a positive correlation between high-cohesion texts and students’ comprehension and learning, particularly for readers who are still developing their language proficiency. Students with stronger reading skills can navigate lower-cohesion texts by drawing on background knowledge and inference, but less proficient readers depend much more heavily on explicit cohesive ties to follow the flow of ideas. This is why cohesive devices are sometimes called the “glue of comprehension” – for struggling readers especially, missing them can mean missing the author’s entire message.
Causal cohesion – the use of devices like because, so, therefore, and as a result – has been shown to be particularly important. Studies on cohesion and coherence indicate that causal relations facilitate comprehension more than temporal or additive ones, especially when they appear at the beginning of a clause, because they alert the reader immediately to an explanatory relationship between ideas.
Teaching cohesion devices in the classroom
Cohesion devices need to be explicitly taught. Many students – even fluent decoders – never consciously notice how authors connect ideas. Keys to Literacy recommends having students physically trace the links in a text: drawing arrows from pronouns to their antecedents, numbering words that refer to the same entity, or highlighting synonym chains across a paragraph. These activities make the invisible structure of a text visible.
Learning Focused suggests that instruction should be graduated by proficiency level. At the primary stage, students can begin with simple conjunctions like and, but, and because, along with basic pronoun tracking. At the intermediate level, they can move on to synonym substitution, adversative conjunctions, and lexical field analysis. At an advanced level, ellipsis, cataphoric reference, and collocational cohesion can be introduced. Each stage builds the reader’s ability to recognise inter-sentential relationships and anticipate the text’s direction.
Practical classroom activities include cloze exercises where cohesion devices have been deleted and students must supply them, sentence reconstruction tasks where scrambled sentences must be reordered using conjunctive clues, and peer review sessions where students identify cohesive ties in each other’s writing. Reading Rockets notes that studies have consistently demonstrated it is possible to raise reading comprehension scores by explicitly teaching students to negotiate cohesive ties – making this one of the most evidence-backed areas of comprehension instruction available.
Cohesion and the analytical reader
For a reader developing analytical skills, understanding cohesion devices does more than improve comprehension – it changes the way they engage with a text. Once a reader learns to notice how a conjunction like however signals a shift in argument, or how a series of synonyms clusters around a central concept, they begin to read with greater awareness of the author’s rhetorical choices. They can see not just what is being said but how the text is constructed to guide their thinking.
This analytical awareness is transferable. A student who can identify cohesive structure in a scientific article can apply the same skills to a literary passage, a legal document, or an opinion editorial. Cohesion analysis, in this sense, is a form of close reading – one grounded not in intuition but in systematic linguistic awareness. As discourse analysis research underlines, sensitivity to the cohesive relations among the linguistic elements of a written text is what enables a reader to truly trust and make sense of the text as a whole.
What do you think? When you encounter a text that feels difficult to follow, is it ever because the cohesive devices are unclear or absent – or because you hadn’t noticed them at all? And as a teacher or future educator, how might making cohesion devices visible to students change the way they approach complex reading tasks?
References
- https://www.routledge.com/Cohesion-in-English/Halliday-Hasan/p/book/9780582550414
- https://www.academia.edu/114807962/From_cohesion_in_text_to_coherence_in_comprehension
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohesion_(linguistics)
- https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/what-are-cohesive-devices-and-how-do-they-affect-comprehension/
- http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Cohesion
- https://learningfocused.com/blogs/teaching-literacy/small-words-big-impact-why-ignoring-cohesive-devices-undermines-comprehension
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01371825
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284461030_A_Study_of_Lexical_Cohesion_Theory_in_Reading_Comprehension
- https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-on-literacy/comprehension-instruction-really-helps-teaching-cohesion
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440211032194
- https://www.academia.edu/97857274/Functions_of_Cohesive_Devices_in_Text_Comprehension_and_Writing
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