Textual coherence in EFL Student Writing

2017

One of the key elements in the organization of any piece of writing is its coherence. To date, many propositions have been given regarding the definition, analysis, and evaluation of text coherence. In the current study, Mann and Thompson's (1988) Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) was adopted as the method of text analysis to detect the coherence breaks in writing samples. In order to see what problems Iranian EFL learners have with regard to text coherence, 64 essays in descriptive and argumentative genres written by male students of a language institute in Shiraz were analyzed. The essays were analyzed for discourse errors using RST. The findings indicated that Iranian EFL learners committed eight different types of coherence errors, namely irrelevant content, violation of completedness, violation of connectedness, incorrect place, incorrect relation, crossed dependency, scattered units, and topic. The reason behind these errors partly came from the learners' tendency to w...

Foreign Language Annals, 1991

What EFL school teachers view as most harmful to coherence in their studentwritten texts is an area which has received very little attention from EFL researchers in the Arab world. This article aims to explore this area and 3. deviation from the intended rhetorical function of the writing task. The article concludes with a section on the implications dmwn from the findings of the study and provides some suggestions regamling the teaching of writing at text level in an EFL context.

Forum, 2002

Journal of Education Culture and Society, 2021

Aim. In academic writing, lack of coherence is thought to occur mostly due to the lack of necessary linguistic skills and knowledge in L2. Thus, the analysis of a written text is concerned with understanding the local relations among the ideas conveyed in a text. Concept. As is usually the case, students writing in a second language generally produce texts that contain varying degrees of grammatical and rhetorical errors. Most of the studies have been conducted with only one criterion for the analysis of coherence and they reported different results. Also, most of them have been conducted on a small scale in terms of the number of participants, and writing samples collected. Therefore, this study tries to investigate the coherence problems/errors of university students in their writing, if any, on a fairly large scale in light of the Cooperative principle and its maxims. Results and conclusion. The study revealed that the basic problem of the students in their essay writing was the ...

This study aims at examining the writing skills of a group of Indonesian graduate students of English. A particular attention has been focused on the coherence of their production of argumentative texts. Employing a discourse analytical case study, three texts written by three Master's degree students of the English language education at a local university in Central Java, Indonesia, were analyzed. Coherence and cohesion is inextricable in which both are crucial in academic writing as to achieve a makes-sense text. Therefore, it is an urgent need to look at the writing competency of students as they are at graduate level, majoring in the English language education. The texts produced by the students were scrutinized through the lens of micro-and macro-level coherence (Thornburry, 2005). From this theory, cohesion is involved in micro level coherence. The findings indicate that the students show a bit weakness on achieving coherent texts due to lack of optimization of cohesive devices especially conjunctions to create interconnectedness of the whole sentences in the texts. Abstract This study aims at examining the writing skills of a group of Indonesian graduate students of English. A particular attention has been focused on the coherence of their production of argumentative texts. Employing a discourse analytical case study, three texts written by three Master's degree students of the English language education at a local university in Central Java, Indonesia, were analyzed. Coherence and cohesion is inextricable in which both are crucial in academic writing as to achieve a makes-sense text. Therefore, it is an urgent need to look at the writing competency of students as they are at graduate level, majoring in the English language education. The texts produced by the students were scrutinized through the lens of micro-and macro-level coherence (Thornburry, 2005). From this theory, cohesion is involved in micro level coherence. The findings indicate that the students show a bit weakness on achieving coherent texts due to lack of optimization of cohesive devices especially conjunctions to create interconnectedness of the whole sentences in the texts.

Issues in Language Teaching (ILT), 2019

The main concern of this study was to identify Iranian intermediate EFL learners' problems in cohesion and coherence of writing performance as well as the extent to which they utilized cohesion and coherence in their writing. The ability to compose a piece of descriptive text is important for EFL and ESL learners. Despite its significance, there is a gap in the literature about how Iranian EFL learners write essays in this genre, which this study intends to fill. The research design involved the utilization of mixed research method in addressing the research questions. The study addressed a corpus of 40 intermediate language learners' descriptive essays, 10 experienced teachers teaching at the intermediate level as the questionnaire respondents, and the answers of four interviewees' from those volunteer experienced teachers. The results of the study revealed that lack of cohesion and coherence in the participants' essays and their writing performance in terms of thes...

Discourse, as an object being studied nowadays in many disciplines of humanity and social sciences, plays a special role in applied linguistics, in both theory and practice. It is characterized mainly by cohesion and coherence; the former is created by some cohesive devices while the latter is established using certain strategies rarely incorporated into and investigated in language skills development. Therefore, this study is concerned with investigating the effect of discourse coherence strategies incorporated into writing instruction on developing writing skill. To this end, 50 Iranian female EFL learners assigned in 5 groups (4 experimental, 1 control) were exposed to four coherence-based strategies, including: 1) Given/New Strategy (GNS), 2) Direct Matching Strategy (DMS), 3) Bridging Strategy (BRS), 4) Reinstating Old Information Strategy (ROIS), 5) Control group conventional instructions of writing skills, respectively. Results of the One-Way ANOVA statistical analysis revealed that using discourse coherence-based strategies in the classroom, compared to mainstream instruction, can more significantly enhance writing ability of EFL learners. In parallel, the Give and New strategy-based instruction proved to be the most effective in developing the target skill. However, cross-strategically, no significant difference was seen among the investigated discourse coherence-based strategies. The findings offer pedagogical implications for L2 practitioners, teachers, materials developers, and autonomy seeking learners. They also provide further research insights in teaching writing beside all other language skills.

Research on Language & Social Interaction, 1984

Current research in textual topic, foreground and background, with special attention paid to applications -

In this study cohesion in 20 compositions is analysed in terms of Halliday and Hasan's model (1976, Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R., Cohesion in English, London: Longman). Coherence is evaluated by native speakers of English on the basis of Grice's maxims of relevance, quantity, and manner (1975, Grice, P., Syntax and Semantics III: Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press). Moreover, the relationship of cohesion to coherence is investigated. The analysis of cohesion showed that the Arab students overused reiteration of the same lexical item as a cohesive device, but underused other lexical and grammatical cohesive devices. The evaluation of coherence, on the other hand, showed that the students failed to supply sufficient information about the assigned topic. The correlation of coherence score with number of cohesive ties was quite low (0.18). The implications of these findings for writing instruction are discussed.

Journal of Nusantara Studies, 2023

Background and Purpose: Writing a coherent written composition is a challenging task for many English foreign learners, especially among English as Foreign Language (EFL) Jordanian students, as many of those learners cannot achieve writing well coherent essays at the university level due to various reasons such as lack of lexical competence and lack of motivation. Due to the fact that very limited studies have focussed on investigating this phenomenon in-depth, especially in the Jordanian context, the present study aims to explore issues and challenges faced by Jordanian students in using coherence in academic essays under the perspectives of writing course instructors. Methodology: This study used a qualitative approach to gather data. The sample comprises eight male instructors from two Jordanian universities. They were selected using a purposive sampling method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants to gain their insights into the issues and significant challenges faced by the students and the potential strategies to overcome the challenges. 20 academic essays produced by 4 th year undergraduate students from the two universities were observed for the purpose.