This qualitative study investigated how a selected group of post-secondary, second language students (L2) students perceive coherence in their written discourse in various disciplinary contexts in a French CEGEP. The primary focus is on the verbal language, or meta-language, derived from participant interviews that students used to describe their written texts. M. A. K. Halliday's (1978) social theory of language, and L. S. Vygotsky's (1962) sociopsychological theories of language provided a framework for conceptualizing the amount of control, self regulation, that students perceive they had in constructing coherent written discourse. Results from the study indicate that although students may have individual terminology about coherence, collegial students with the most successful self-regulated strategies described coherence across disciplines, and global features of text organization. Results also indicate that there is a lack of synchrony between students and teachers' interpretation of written tasks assigned in this French collegial institutional setting.

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Coherence and incoherence in conversation refer to the relationship between adjacent parts of the conversation (e.g., between one statement and the next, or between one topic and the next). A clear, relevant connection is called coherent; the absence of an obvious connection is incoherent. Coherence and incoherence are therefore central to any analysis of discourse, but, despite many existing theories of coherence and incoherence, there is little empirical knowledge of these phenomena. This dissertation continues the study of coherence began in my master's thesis. In it I propose three axioms to describe the structure of coherence throughout conversations: I. Both coherence and incoherence are necessary for conversation to occur. II. Conversations optimize coherence both globally and locally. III. Coherence is optimized at several different, hierarchical levels of conversation. Because there is already evidence that coherence is maximized at a global level (Black, 1986/1988), I chose to test whether coherence is optimized at a local level. Specifically, local optimization of sequential coherence relations would consist of a series of alternations between coherence and incoherence. I also sought to test this hypothesis at several different levels of conversation (statement, topic, and macrotopic). In order to test the hypothesis, it was necessary to develop a method for segmenting conversations into statements, topics, and macrotopics and a method for measuring the degree of coherence between these segments. Using the guidelines developed, two judges were able to segment conversations at all three levels with high reliability. Similarly, other sets of raters used a magnitude estimation procedure to scale the degree of coherence between units at each of these levels and again achieved high reliability. It was also necessary to develop a time-series analytic technique for verifying the predicted series of alternations in short sequences of data, because existing methods are not applicable to small Ns. The new statistic is based on the geometric properties of a particular data set: it compares the obtained sum of the interior angles facing toward the mean of the data series with the sum of the interior angles facing the mean of all other permutations of these data points. Three getting-acquainted conversations were obtained; these yielded 325 statements (the spoken equivalent of a sentence). After segmentation, coherence scaling, and application of the optimization statistic, there was moderate support for the hypothesis of local optimization. Three quarters of the topics contained sequences of propositions with a sum of interior angles that was smaller than the sum of half of the alternative permutations. At the macrotopic level, however, the hypothesis was not supported. The contributions of this dissertation are (1) an explicit, parsimonious, discourse-based theory of coherence; (2) objective methods for measuring and studying coherence; and (3) a new time-series statistic; and (4) encouraging but not yet convincing evidence for the theory. / Graduate

The main a i m of this stud y is to contri bute t o the e x pl i cation of the central discourse notion , ' co herence ' , by comparing t he d e ns i ties of differen t te xtual features in more cohe rent a nd l e s s cohe rent studen t a c ademic writing . The l a tte r ty pe of writing i s defined as that sub-genre of e x posi t ory wr i ting tha t is required f rom studen ts in the study o f "co ntent " sub j ects , with composition writi ng e xcluded . A corpus o f studen t academ i c te x t s was assessed i mpressionistic al ly f or c ohere nce by three rater s, using Bamberg ' s Ho lis t i c Coherence Sca l e ( Bamberg 1983 ; 1984) as a gu id e , an d s o eac h t e x t ' s Holi stic Coherence Rat ing (HCR ) was der i v ed . The te x t ual fea tu r es investiga t ed are r e f erence and c onjuncti ve cohes i o n and errors in these domains, a n d also relat i onal coherence, th i s l atter term ref erring to the wa y s in whic h the funct i onal units of te x t cohere wit h one another in terms of binary r elation s (c f . Crombie 1985a; 1985 b) such as Reason-Res ult a nd Means- Purpose. One of the k e y bac kground assumptions of the study is that te xts are c ommunicati ve phenomena , and a f ter a cr i tical review of various approac hes t owards the e x p li cation of ' coherence ' in text l inguistics and in quanti t ative ( corpus-based) writing research, an a n al y t i cal f ramework is developed in which subcategories of reference and conjunctive cohesion, and errors in these domains, are defined not only formally, but also in terms of how they function in the conte x t of communication - with specific reference to the pragmatic conte x t of student academic writing . Relational coherence is also included i n this framework, and the study develops a measure for the quantification of the amount of relational coherence in a text - the Relational Coherence Quotient. Sample analyses demonstrating the application of the framework to the texts form part of the study. The main findings of the study are: that the application of the analytical framework identifies considerably more features that correlate significantly with Holistic Coherence Ratings than do two other quantitative writing research approaches; that the functionally defined features correlate more significantly with the HCR ' s than the formally defined features; and that the most strongly significant correlation with HCR ' s was revealed by relational coherence, as quantified by the Relational Coherence Quotient. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil.(Linguistics)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Jyvaskyla, 1983. / Added t.p. inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-292).

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College Dept. of Classics, and Haverford College Dept. of Religion, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Jyvaskyla, 1983. / Added t.p. inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-292).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed Sept. 9, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 202-209).

The group of people aged 85 years and older is the fastest growing chronological population on the United States (Neal et al., 1993), and while a considerable amount of research has focused on the language of the elderly (those over 65 years), relatively little study has focused specifically on those aged 85 and older. This study is valuable in that it includes a large sample of optimally healthy people aged 85 and older. This sample of the optimally-healthy oldest-old will help define what changes, if any, are a function of age alone and what changes are clinical (associated with some disease, neurologic complication, or psychological impairment). The purpose of this study was to compare two groups of elderly people's use of cohesion during an expository discourse task. This study also sought to answer the following question: If no health problems exist, does age alone affect the cohesion in the expository discourse of the elderly? To effect this comparison, a comparison of cohesive use in a group of 12 people between the ages of 65 and 75 years (the young-old) was contrasted with cohesion used by a group of 27 people aged 85 years and older (the oldest-old). The subjects were gathered as part of the Oregon Brain Aging Study under the direction of doctors Diane Howieson and Jeffrey Kaye of the Portland VA Medical Center. The subjects had to meet strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. As part of the evaluations for the Oregon Brain Aging Study, each subject was audiotaped while describing the fishing picture from the Neurobehavioral Cognitive Inventory (Kiernan et al., 1987). Each sample was then transcribed, divided into T-Units, and analyzed according to the cohesive analysis designed by Liles (1985) and Liles et al. (1989). Group comparisons for each aspect of cohesion (frequency, style, and adequacy) was completed using a 1- test. No significant differences at the .05 level were found on any of the measures.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.