Teaching Coherence in Second Language Writing

Presented by Saimou (Simon) ZHANG zhangsaimou@yahoo.fr

IELTS Writing Instructor at Global Education Group Inc.

UBC MA student majoring in Adult Education

Rationale In light of the newly released federal government

policy, Canada is expected to double its number of international students and academic researchers by 2022 (Ottawa Citizen, 2014).

In fact, academic writing was and has always been identified as a considerable concern for most English language learners (ELL) (e.g., Braine, 2002).

Compared with native language speakers, second language (L2) learners invariably have more difficulties in accomplishing academic writing assignments due to their limited language skills (e.g., Ferris & Hedgcock, 2014)

Rationale

What determines L2 writing quality Among all influencing factors contributing to effectiveL2 writing, coherence (or/and cohesion) is normallyconsidered as a crucial factor in achieving the unity intext (e.g., Chiang, 1999, 2003; Lee, 2002).

One criterion in assessing the language proficiency in the high-stake tests (i.e., IELTS, TOEFL, CELPIP)

Rationale

Difficult to teach and learn

Despite the crucial role coherence assumes in assessing L2 writing in either university context or in high-stake language test, it can be argued that to some extent language instructors and examiners have not reached consensus in terms of how to conceptualize coherence; coherence still remains as a blurred concept (Lee, 2002)

Rationale

Possible theoretical Frameworks

Particularly, Halliday & Hansen (1976) described coherence as “the total unity” (p. 2) in a text encompassing both “linguistic features” (p. 2) and “context of situation” (p. 21) which concerns extra-linguistic factors such as genre and purpose of communication.

In the same vein, Lee (2002) proposed that coherence is comprised of two levels, i.e., “internal to the text” and “internal to the reader” (p. 137). Without denying the importance of “internal to the reader” or “context of situation”, Lee (2002) further articulated five coherence-creating devices at the linguistic level, namely metadiscourse, cohesion, topical structure analysis, propositional development and macrostructure.

Possible theoretical Frameworks

Similar efforts have been made on the part of other ESL/EFL teachers either based on the manageable approach proposed by Lee (2002), or on alternative theoretical frameworks created by their own (e.g., Todd, Thienpermpool & Keyuravong, 2004; Todd, Somreudee & Darasawang, 2007; Liangprayoon, Chaya & Thep, 2013).

My theoretical framework

On the basis of the theoretical framework proposed by Lee (2002), I conceptualize coherence by using three approaches

Perspective 1: cohesive relation analysis

Perspective 2: topical structure analysis

Perspective 3: macrostructure/genre analysis

Perspective 1: CohesionAs a semantic concept, cohesion refers to the relations ofmeaning that exist within the text, and that define it as atext. Cohesion occurs “where the interpretation of someelement in the discourse is dependent on that ofanother” (Halliday & Hansen, p. 4).

Five subcategories of cohesion

Reference

Conjunction

Lexical cohesion

Substitution

Ellipsis

Previous studies The studies conducted by Liu and Braine (2005) and

Ong (2011) demonstrated that compared with

reference and reference and conjunction, lexical cohesion appears to be a more reliable predictor of coherent L2 writing, which receive a higher rating.

Lexical cohesion

The concept of Lexical cohesion, which represents the lexical relationship established by reiterating the lexical items (Halliday & Hansen, 1976), can be subdivided into two distinguishing yet interrelated aspects, namely lexical reiteration & lexical collocation.

Lexical reiteration

The use of lexical repetition, synonym, general word/superordinate

Lexical repetitionExample 1:

Blood, Chambers, Donald, Hasebe-Laudt and Big Head (2012) discuss the creation of a metissage in their chapter Aoksisowaato' op: place and story as organic curriculum. In the process of creating their own metissages, the authors "shared these stories with each other and then worked together to weave a shared script that includes the central place-story

Example 2:

Such a decision of drawing Japanese Canadian students out of school was labeled as the “lamentable” page of UBC history; it also represents a “lamentable” page in the Canadian history.

Example 1

The Western curriculum inquiry experienced a transition in which the how took over the what question’s dominance place and becomes the central question when coping with curriculum issues nowadays (Egan, 2003).

Example 2

Feeling as both a Japanese and non-Japanese, he identified himself as an insider not fully “in”, and an outsider not fully “out”. Experiencing ethnicity as a Japanese Canadian, Aoki underwent a process of inquiry, wandering through “strangeness and familiarity”, to transform his lived experienced into a better understanding of “who we are” and “how we come to be who we are, and where we are going”.

Synonyms

In terms of “where we are going”, Aoki’s dialectical attitude, “keeping the rose and sakura in view simultaneously” (p. 334), not only epitomizes his life philosophy and trajectory, but prompts us to think about the potential perspectives that we can take to look into life. Instead of confining ourselves to “mono-vision existence” (p. 334), we could embrace a broader image if we opt for double visions. While at the same time, the two visions remain their own integrities. This multi-dimension way of interpreting life, or what we would call the tolerance of various cultures, is mostly required especially in the world of today. In this sense, Aoki could be called the transformative intellectual who “envisions what is possible rather than merely accepting what is probable”(Kanu & Glor, 2006, p. 107). The possible is what Aoki has practiced all his life and what he envisaged: sakura and rose blossoming in the “provincial university without provincialism” (Toope, 2012); the probable is the history depicted solely as Europeans landing their feet on the promising land of North America (Stanley, 1999).

Example 3 Synonyms

General noun/superordinate

Example 1

Egan attributes one significant influence of this transition to Rousseau’s belief that children have good natural potential; therefore, given freedom of option, children are able to naturally incline to learn good things (2003). This idea shows the glory of humanism and individuality, but does not seem realistic.

Example 2

They were called to leave. This unexpected incident occurred when the Japanese Army attacked the Pearl Harbor. Such a decision of drawing Japanese Canadian students out of school was labeled as the “lamentable” page of UBC history.

Lexical collocationthe use of lexical items that are interrelated

lexicosemantically; the relations of these lexical items are proximate and recognizable. As is often the case, such lexical relations are realized through long cohesive chains rather than a simple pair of words.

Sharing the same/similar lexical environment

Poetry….literature…reader…writer…style

Sky…sunny spell…….gust of wind….drizzle

Lexical collocation

Example 1

I believe it is important to cultivate students to be inclusive, especially since Canada has such a large immigrant population with a variety of ethnic groups. Life writing brings to students new possibilities to view themselves from a different angle to learn about themselves, to learn about others, and to learn about the world. Educators and curriculum designers might try to be as inclusive as possible to offer students an opportunity to get to know that there are other sides of a story. I, as a future teacher, cannot offer any constructive suggestions on how to implement that in the system at this moment, but one thing I am sure of is that the spirit of being inclusive should be stressed throughout the whole process of learning and teaching, especially for those who are considered not in the mainstream, life writing is clearly one way that would allow for each individual to be seen and for his or her voice to be heard.

Lexical collocation Example 2:

As an international student from China, my impression of curriculum was very specific. What “curriculum” meant to me is the nationally standardized and detailed teaching content, in which the facts and knowledge students should know and to what degree they have to master are elaborated. To make curriculum requirements more detailed, the textbooks from elementary school to high school are designated by national educational bureaus. In a word, what has to be contained in education is largely unified across the country and little room is left for teachers to adjust or modify. As a result, most of teachers focus on drilling contents in students heads by repetition and practicing test skills without thinking what should be included in curriculum, let alone in what sequence and in what means. Meanwhile, under the pressure of the national college entrance tests, few students have time to query the appropriateness of our curriculum.

Relations between the use of cohesive devices and coherent writing

the

The relations between cohesive devices and L2 writing quality turn out to be problematic.

On one hand, the number of cohesive relations in writing helps achieve connectedness of meanings in text, and thus create an overall good writing quality. (e.g., Chiang,1999; Liu and Braine (2005); Ong, 2011).

On the other hand, Halliday and Hansen (1976) suggested that “cohesion does not concern what a text means” (p. 26). Empirically, Carnell (1982) argued that a text can be cohesive in sentence structure, but make little sense to its readers. This is echoed by the study conducted by Zhang (2000) who concluded that the number of cohesive devices employed by mainland China EFL learners at university has little influence on the L2 writing test score.

Perspective 2-topical structure analysis

Topical structure analysis foregrounds the notion of managing information flow at the paragraph level. Precisely, this approach, originally developed by Lautamatti (1987), looks at how sentence topics work progressively (i.e., topics repeat, shift and return to the earlier progression) to build meaning in a discourse (Schneider and Conner,1990).

Identify sentence topics:

the arrangment of information within a sentence

Topic (main idea/topic of a sentence):

1) grammatical subject of a sentence

2) noun/noun phrase

Comment (what is being said about the topic)

1) grammatical predicate of a sentence

parallel progression

sequential progression

extended parallel progression

Three types of sentence progressions (Conner & Farmer, 1990)

Parallel progression (1)Chocolates are a national craving. (2)Records show that they are sold in huge quantities-1

1.2 pounds per capita per year. (3)Designer chocolates often sell for nearly $30/Ib. (4)It is obvious that these candies are America's number one choice.

1 Chocolates 2 they 3 Designer chocolates 4 these candies

The sentence topics are semantically identical

(Connor & Farmer,1990)

Sequential progression

The sentence topics are always different, as the comment of the previous sentence becomes the topic of the next sentence.

Rousseau’s idea reminds me of a classic Chinese text called “Three Word Primer” ( 三字经 in Chinese) which was used as teaching material for children in ancient time. The first sentence in this essay expresses the same belief that children are born with a good nature, but a child’s education and home environment greatly determines what the child will become. Thus, it will be the parents’ fault if they do not educate their children about the right things and the teachers’ mistake if they do not take responsibility for a child’s curriculum

Sequential progression

On the one hand, we do benefit a lot from the content-oriented and intense expectations of the Chinese curriculum. For example, one of my Chinese friends who had his high school here in Canada told me that high school math was very easy since he has already learnt most of those formulas and principles in his middle school back in China. Thanks to our curriculum, Chinese student’s abilities on various tests and in academic competitions are well known, especially in math and science.

Extended Parallel progression Parallel progressions intermingled with sequential progressionsIn a nutshell, reparative curriculum is education’s new attempt to engage students with traumatic human history of violence so as to develop their “inborn theory-in-feeling capacity” to feel pathetic for others’suffering (Tarc, 2011, p. 367). Being a program that emphasizes “love development of and care for another’s existence” (p. 368), reparative learning is a promising field in contemporary education and curriculum study, which place great attention on human beings themselves. However, educators and teachers generally shows resistance to its exposure of painstaking and violent histories, in that the contents may not be age-appropriate for the students. Under such circumstance, reparative curriculum leaves educators “with an unfinished story” (p. 369). Education should be more than a program of transmitting knowledge and skills to students; it needs change. It is responsible for bringing students into the political and real world “saturated with the brokeness of people” (p. 367). Reparative curriculum, in this sense, is feasible and efficient in performing the duty, as long as we know how to carefully lead our students into the history step by step.

parallel progression sequential progressionextended parallel

progression

Schneider and Conner (1990) showed that high proportion of sequential progressions and extended parallel progressions were commonly used in highly rated TOEFL essay samples.

Perspective 3-macrostructure

The third perspective to study coherence in L2 writing is by using genre approach. It identifies the “recurring or characteristic textual (oral or written) responses to the requirements of the social context” (Polio & Williams, 2011, p. 496). Rather than conceptualizing coherence at the sentence and the paragraph level, this approach focuses on the overall structure/macrostructure of a discourse

The Reader Response Commentary, whose rhetorical structure is prescribed by its target readers/audience (the course instructor in the first place), is subject to contextualized changes/adjustment to make the genre in question more coherent at the discourse level.

Introductory paragraph

As required by the course instructor, two students offered a recapitulation of their readings in their introductory paragraph of the essay, while Min elaborated on a key concept crucial to understanding her subsequent summary of the article; Mou in the first place recounted a historical episode to contextualize the central issue in his reading.

Roy

Para 1 (summary of the reading)

Blood, Chambers, Donald, Hasebe-Laudt and Big Head (2012) discuss the creation of a metissage in their chapter Aoksisowaato' op: place and story as organic curriculum. In the process of creating their own metissages, the authors "shared these stories with each other and then worked together to weave a shared script that includes the central place-story" (Blood et al, 2012, p. 49). In their life stories, cultural, racial, national, and linguistic issues were discussed autobiographically, and meanwhile the authors intrigued me to reflect on my own story, history, and memory.

Ling

Para 1 (summary of the reading)

Egan’s “What is Curriculum” (2003) explores the meaning and history of curriculum and really expands my understanding of the concept. Before reading this article, my understanding of curriculum was very narrow because of my lack of background knowledge.

Min Para 1 (elaborating a central term and summarizing the reading)

The basics of education emerges neither from the curriculum developers nor the learners. Instead, as Grumet (1995) explains, education is rooted in human history and lived experience. This ‘middle’ she suggests is likely to be the history of our existence, or it could be the “terrible human history [of mass violence]” in particular, as discussed in Aparna Mishra Tarc’s Reparative Curriculum (2011, p. 350). In response to the question of how education can emerge through the reading of historical texts, Tarc (2011) argues that reparative curriculum makes lessons from traumatic history of mass human violence and supports learners’ public engagement with “the unimaginable lives and worlds of others” (p. 350).

Mou

Para 1 (context)

In 2012, with sakura blossoming and floating in the breeze, a special yet destined ceremony was held inside the UBC campus: seventy-six Japanese Canadians were awarded the honorary degree. Present at the scene were not seventy-six, though. Some of them already passed away; some of them scattered in either eastern provinces of Canada or Japan. In fact, these aged were the then students at the university but were unable to complete their studies. They were called to leave. This unexpected incident occurred when the Japanese Army attacked the Pearl Harbor.

Mou

Para 2 (context)

Such a decision of drawing Japanese Canadian students out of school was labeled as the “lamentable” page of UBC history; it also represents a “lamentable” page in the Canadian history. Yet, under the consistent efforts by Mary Kitagawa, who led the campaign for UBC to award these Japanese Canadian students honorary degrees, justice was done. In terms of UBC, as one highly prestigious university in the world, acknowledging its own fault is not easy. It takes courage. More importantly, such a gesture gives insight into clarifying this episode of history, which hardly anyone in modern times knows, let alone understands and hardly anyone in the past is willing to mention.

Mou

Para 3 (summary of the reading)

Aoki’s trajectory of lived experience was actually horizontally set during this history episode against the background of the Second World War, which could be seen from his this week’s reading “”Experiencing Ethnicity as a Japanese Canadian Teacher: Reflections on a Personal Curriculum“. Feeling as both a Japanese and non-Japanese, he identified himself as an insider not fully “in”, and an outsider not fully “out”. Experiencing ethnicity as a Japanese Canadian, Aoki underwent “a process of inquiry”, wandering through “strangeness and familiarity”, to transform his lived experienced into a better understanding of “who we are” and “how we come to be who we are, and where we are going”.

Thank you ！

Merci ！

谢谢观赏！

Reference

Braine, G. (2002). Academic literacy and the nonnative speaker graduate student. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 1(1), 59-68.

Carrell, P. L. (1982). Cohesion is not coherence. TESOL Quarterly, 16 (4), 479-488.

Chiang, S.Y. (1999). Assessing grammatical and textual features in L2 writing samples: the case of French as a foreign language. Modern Language Journal, 83(2), 219–232.

Chiang, S. Y. (2003). The importance of cohesive conditions to perceptions of writing quality at the early stages of foreign language learning. System, 31, 471-484.

Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric: cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing. Ulla Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Connor, U., & Farmer, M. (1990). Teaching topical structure analysis as a revision strategy for ESL writers. In B. Kroll (eds.), Second language writing: research insights for the classroom (pp. 126-139). New York: Cambridge University Press

Schneider, M., & Conner, U. (1990). Analyzing topical structure in ESL essay: Not all topics are equal. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 12, 411-427.

Ferris. D., & Hedgcock, J. (2014). Teaching L2 Composition. New York: Routledge.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Hyland, K. (2009). Academic discourses. London, England: Continuum.

Lautamatti, L. (1987). Observations on the development of the topic in simplified discourse. In U. Conner & R.B. Kaplan (eds.), Writing across languages: analysis of L2 text (pp. 87-113). Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.

Lee, I. (2002). Teaching coherence to ESL students: a classroom inquiry. Journal of Second Language Writing, 11, 135-159.

Liangprayoon, S., Chaya, W., & Thep, A. T. (2013) The effect of topicalnstructure analysis instruction on university students' writing quality. English Language Teaching, 6 (7), 60-71.

Ottawa Citizen. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Feds+double+number+international+students/9388016/story.html

Liu, M., & Braine, G. (2005). Cohesive features in argumentative writing produced by Chinese undergraduates. System, 33 (4), 623-636.

Ong, J. (2011). Investigating the use of cohesive devices by Chinese EFL learners. Asian EFL Journal, 13(3), 42-65.

Polio, C. & Williams, J. (2011). Teaching and testing writing. In Long, M.H. & Doughty, C. (eds.). The handbook of language teaching (pp. 486-517). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

.

Todd. R. W., Thienpermpool, P., & Keyuravong, S. (2004). Measuring the coherence of writing using topic-based analysis. Assessing Writing 9, 85-104.

Todd. R. W., Somreudee, K. & Darasawang, P. (2007). Coherence, cohesion and comments on students’ academic essays Assessing Writing 12, 10-25.

Yang, W. X., & Sun, Y. (2012). The use of cohesive devices in argumentative writing by Chinese EFL learners at different proficiency levels. Linguistics and Education, 23, 31-48.

Zhang, M. (2000). Cohesive features in exploratory writing of undergraduates in two Chinese universities. RELC Journal, 31, 61–93.