This article explores the role of text cohesion in the comprehension and production of text. While most discourse models have considered the roles of the text features and the reader, the crucial role of writers' epistemic stance has not been widely considered. The thesis explored here is that levels of cohesion emerge in text based on the…

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of perceived student gender on the feedback given to undergraduate student work. Participants (n = 12) were lecturers in higher education and were required to mark two undergraduate student essays. The first student essay that all participants marked was the "control" essay.…

This article describes a cooperative writing response initiative designed to develop writing skills in foreign/second-language contexts (hereafter L2). The strategy originated from my desire to cater for my learners' need to become better writers in English within a constrained educational environment in Argentina. In this article I describe this…

This essay argues that multiculturalism-inflected composition classrooms often "flatten" or efface radical alterities with which students--and teachers--should be encouraged to grapple. The authors demonstrate some of the limitations of such pedagogies, offer examples of provocative texts that celebrate difference--not identity--as a…

In the context of Learning Technologies, the need to be able to assess the learning and domain comprehension in open-ended learner responses has been present in artificial intelligence and education since its beginnings. The advantage of using summaries is that they allow teachers to diagnose comprehension and the amount of information remembered…

Transitions in ESL contexts generally refer to those linking words placed between sentences and between paragraphs. Transitions in writing (and in speaking) are helpful; they facilitate coherence and cohesion when used correctly. Understanding them when reading allows us to join the writer in seeing why and how idea B follows idea A. In this…

In this article, the author traces the history of the five-paragraph theme and the views about it, along with arguing for its elimination in writing instruction in favor of problem-based, "rich-task" writing experiences for students. She intends to bring together various voices on theme writing across time along with some key bits of the history…

This study focused on 12th-grade Chilean students' ability to produce locally coherent persuasive texts and on the cognitive basis that underlies this ability. All the participants wrote persuasive texts and answered a test of recognition of incoherent sequences. A subsample wrote another persuasive text while thinking aloud and had a…

This study looks into the use of reiteration relations in EFL student writing. The aim is to determine the extent to which Moroccan college students rely on lexical cohesion to produce native-sounding texts. Twenty essays written by college students from two different levels were analyzed quantitatively using Halliday and Hasan's (1976) and Hoey's…

We report in this paper on one aspect of a project designed to support teachers with the demands of the Language strand of the Australian Curriculum for English as this guides their development of a coherent account of knowledge about language and their implementation of this in building their students' literacy repertoires. We map the changing…

This study used a new computational linguistics tool, the Coh-Metrix, to investigate and measure the differences in cohesion and lexical network density between native speaker and non-native speaker writing, as well as to investigate L2 proficiency level differences in cohesion and lexical network density. This study analyzed data from three…

This paper explores the problems of EFL classroom writings in the Chinese college teaching context from the perspective of textual organization and pragmatic strategy. Influence of their native cultural thought pattern causes the problem of discourse pattern and cohesion; lack of sufficient pragmatic strategy renders students' unawareness in…

The purpose of this paper is to identify the discourse markers used by Saudi EFL learners in their paragraph writing. The study was conducted on fifty students of the Preparatory Year Program at Qassim University. Data were collected from one hundred paragraphs written by the students at the end of the first and second semesters of the academic…

This study explores the following research question: How do secondary English learners (ELs) and Re-designated fluent English proficient students (RFEPs) use academic words in analytical writing in comparison to native English speakers (NESs)? It highlights previously overlooked differences in academic word use in the writing of students who are…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of discourse markers that Yemeni EFL learners use in their composition writings. The research questions addressed in this paper are (1) what are the DMs that are frequently used by Yemeni EFL learners? and (2) is there a direct relationship between the use of such markers and the writing quality…