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41	Coherence breaks in first-year essays written by English second language (ESL) university students Watkinson, Hawthorne Janice 01 1900 (has links) Writing coherent essays is evidence of a university student's discourse competence and is important in terms of academic success. An analytical taxonomy of coherence breaks {both topic-related and cohesion-related), based on Wikborg (1985; 1990), was used to determine the frequency of coherence breaks in essays written by first-year English Second Language (ESL) students. A subset of these essays was selected for assessment of their holistic coherence (HCR) by raters. The major finding of the statistical tests is that there is a significant relationship between the frequency of coherence breaks, particularly topic-related coherence breaks, and holistic coherence. Furthermore, the relationship between the coherence of essays and marks awarded them was established. Tutor intervention was also found to have had a positive impact when draft and final versions were compared: in general, there was a decrease in the frequency of coherence breaks, and a greater perception of coherence in the final versions. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Linguistics) Coherence Cohesion Reader-based Text-based Coherence breaks Topic-related Cohesion-related Topic control Unspecified introduction Topic drift English Second Language(ESL) Process approach 428.24 Second language acquisition Topic drift Topic control Cohesion (Linguistics)

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Coherence breaks in first-year essays written by English second language (ESL) university students