Disrupting Cohesive Patterns in Academic Theses: A Corpus-Assisted Study of FSS theses at NUML

This study investigates the grammatical cohesion patterns in MPhil theses submitted by students in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the National University of Modern Languages (NUML), Islamabad. Drawing upon Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) cohesion model, this research aims to explore the frequency and usage patterns of grammatical cohesive devices in academic discourse and highlight their appropriate and inappropriate applications. Using a mixed-methods approach, a corpus of thirty theses from the departments of Education, International Relations, and Pakistan Studies is compiled and analyzed with AntConc software (3.5.8) and manual annotation. The findings reveal that the most frequently used cohesive devices were references (12.53%) and conjunctions (5.71%), while ellipses (0.28%) and substitution (0.09%) appeared less frequently. Moreover, the study identified instances of inappropriate use of these devices, indicating challenges in cohesive writing among ESL postgraduate students. The comparative analysis across the three departments reveals differences in cohesion usage, with Education showing the most consistent application. The study contributes to improving academic writing pedagogy by recommending targeted instructional strategies for teaching cohesion to ESL learners.