Reference cohesion, conjunctive cohesion and relational coherence in student academic writing

Abstract

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.