The authors investigated the relationship between the acquisition of cultural life scripts and the degree of coherence in children's and adolescents' life stories. Three groups of Danish school children aged 9 to 15 years participated. In 3 sessions, they wrote down a recently experienced single autobiographical event, their life story, and their…

This mixed methods study combining a single-subject experimental design with an embedded case study focuses on the impact of a visual treatment on the handwritten and typed output of a struggling male writer during his 5th through 7th grades who has undergone a longitudinal remedial phase of two and a half years creating text-only material as well…

Practitioners working closely with second language (L2) writers in the US recognize at least two types of L2 students: international (IL2) and Generation 1.5 (G1.5) students. Some argue that specific differences in each group's writing performance are evident (cf. Harklau, 2003; Reid, 2006); however, investigations into observable and measurable…

The category of coherence in rating scales has often been criticized for being vague. Typical descriptors might describe students' writing as having 'a clear progression of ideas' or "lacking logical sequencing." These descriptors inevitably require subjective interpretation on the side of the raters. A number of researchers (Connor & Farmer,…

This study examined the representation of knowledge in text writing in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults in the Netherlands. The research analyzed the use of clause linking devices to compose larger text units. Special attention was given to the use of causal relational markers and the extent to which causal relations within the texts matched…

The English cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan makes great contributions to the understanding of the coherence and cohesion of the English texts. It should be applicable in the teaching of English writing so as to improve the cohesion in the students' compositions. The present paper describes a practice of this order among non-major…

This study examined Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' ability to establish textual cohesion in English through appropriate selection of reference forms and reference management strategies in their written narrative discourse. It employed both quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore how the language-specific reference…

The aim of this study was to investigate discourse markers in descriptive compositions of 90 Iranian students who were selected from two universities. Without any instruction, they were given a topic to write a descriptive composition per week for 8 weeks. 598 compositions were collected, and they were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively by…

A discussion based upon principles of design and pattern defined by Stephen C. Pepper in Principles of Art Appreciation." (Author/RD)

It is said that one important aspect of education is the production of coherent discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). This is the speaker's or the writer's ability to organize relevant meanings in relation to each other, and this in turn requires the establishment of "chain interaction"--relations between components of a message--in a text. The…

This paper analyzes the use of a special type of unspecific noun, called "shell nouns" [Hunston, S., & Francis, G. (1999). "Pattern grammar". Amsterdam: Benjamins; Schmid, H. (2000). "English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: From corpus to cognition". Berlin: Walter de Gruyter], which are frequently used as cohesive devices, in the written…

Because cohesion is important both to the reader and the writer to create and comprehend a text, teachers have placed much emphasis on text cohesion and coherence in their teaching and evaluation of writing. Using Halliday and Hasan's [Halliday, M.A.K., Hasan, R. (1976). "Cohesion in English." Longman, London] taxonomy of cohesive…

Discusses a pedagogically useful model of text structure in which text structure is mapped as a three-dimensional structure of interconnected T-units, or a discourse matrix. Illustrates and explains a sample discourse matrix and tells why matrix diagraming is more useful than other systems that represent text structure. (FL)

Although current theories concerning the composing process overlap in useful and interesting ways, a paradigm is emerging. This article discusses two of the major assumptions of this emerging paradigm: that there are distinct purposes for each kind of discourse (for example, expressive, literary, persuasive, and referential) and that the relation…