A study of cohesion and coherence in English as a second language students’ writing

Abstract

This article examines cohesion and coherence in ESL learners’ writing compared with the writing of native English speakers.

Altogether six essays on argumentative tasks were analyzed using Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion theory. The coherence in the essays was measured during holistic ratings and an interactive text analysis based on speech act theory. The results of the study show that to be cohesive, an ESL essay did not need to be coherent. Furthermore, general cohesion density was not found to be a discriminating factor between the native speakers and ESL writers. The ESL writers were found, however, to lack the variety of lexical cohesive devices used by the native speakers. With respect to coherence, ESL learners’ writing lacked: 1) adequate justification for claim statements, and 2) sufficient linking of concluding statements to preceding subtopics of the problem.