Cohesive Ties and Their Impact on Children's Story Comprehension

Abstract

This study examines the significance of cohesive ties in constructing children’s stories and their influence on children story comprehension. Simplicity is one of the essential conditions by which children’s stories are recognized.  This study aims to determine the occurrence frequency of cohesive ties in two children’s stories, illustrate the impact of their uses on the degree of clarity and ambiguity children’s stories and point out their influence on the children’s comprehension to such kind of genre. The stories employed are ‘Golden Windows’ and ‘The Pig Brother’ by Laura Richards. This study adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches. It is quantitative as it finds out the frequency of the use of cohesive ties in the selected children’s stories. It is qualitative as it determines the influences of the use of cohesive ties on the construction of children’s stories, and on the process of conveying messages in such stories.  This study adopts Halliday and Hasan (1976) cohesion model for the recognition of cohesive ties. One of the significant concluding points this study has come up with is that the simplicity and the clarity of the children’s stories are mainly connected to the avoidance certain cohesive ties such as exophora, clausal substitution, verbal ellipsis and clausal ellipsis.