Abstract:

This study investigates the effect of recognizing the lexical cohesive relations of written text on the reading comprehension of Libyan university students studying English as a foreign language. 3rd year English university students from Al-Jabal Al-Gharbi University were chosen to be the participants of this study. They were divided into control and comparative groups and given a two version of reading comprehension test. The first one with highlighted lexical items which has certain lexical cohesive relations such as a number of instances of repetition, synonyms, superordinate, antonyms and collocation; and the second identical version with normal print. The descriptive and the t-test analyses of the treatment group test results and the control group test results suggested that the performance of both groups was similar, since no significant difference of means was recorded between them. This result has many pedagogical implications.

Keywords:

Cohesion, coherence, lexical, reiteration, collocation.