چكيده
This study examined the use of lexical cohesion in English political news articles published in local and international English newspapers. To this end, a corpus of 40,000 words (20,000 in each corpus) were collected from political news articles published in international English newspapers (e.g. the Washington post, the New York times, etc..) and local English newspapers (e.g. Iran front page, Tehran times) in 2017 (randomly selected from January to December) and were analyzed based on Tanskanen’s (2006) classification of lexical cohesion. Results displayed that the number of lexical cohesion was used in local English corpus included 1726 and the number of lexical cohesion was used in international English corpus included 1680. The findings showed variations in the use of collocation and reiteration in the two corpora. Moreover, international English newspapers used statistically more frequently substitution, equivalence, contrast, activity related, and elaborative collocation than local English newspapers. On the other hand, local English newspapers used significantly more simple repetition, complex repetition, generalization, specification, co-specification, and order set collocation when writing political news article. Additionally, there was a significant difference between the two groups in subset of reiteration and collocation such as equivalence, generalization, specification, contrast, and activity related collocation. The findings of this study can benefit both English language teaching and learning in the classroom. It is suggested that lexical cohesion be taught in English language classroom to enhance language learners’ reading ability.
