The constructed responses individuals generate while reading can provide insights into their coherence-building processes. The current study examined how the cohesion of constructed responses relates to performance on an integrated writing task. Participants (N = 95) completed a multiple document reading task wherein they were prompted to think…

The constructed responses individuals generate while reading can provide insights into their coherence-building processes. The current study examined how the cohesion of constructed responses relates to performance on an integrated writing task. Participants (N = 95) completed a multiple document reading task wherein they were prompted to think…

Assessing student writing is a complex task and experimental studies have shown that textual determinants, such as spelling or vocabulary, affect teachers' judgments of other analytic criteria in student essays. Among these elements, organisation has not been extensively explored. This experimental study examines how organisational quality…

This study examines links between essay quality and text elaboration and text cohesion. For this study, 35 students wrote two essays (on two different prompts) and for each, were given 15 minutes to elaborate on their original text. An expert in discourse comprehension then modified the original and elaborated essays to increase cohesion,…

This empirical study attempts to examine the use of cohesive devices in the written discourse of EFL undergraduate students and seeks to find how the use of incorrect and repetitive cohesive ties affects the effectiveness of academic writing. Halliday and Hasan's (1976) list of cohesive devices was employed to analyze the cohesion in the…

This study aims to examine the effect of strategic planning training on cohesion in English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' writing. We recruited 62 Chinese learners of English and divided them evenly into experimental and control groups. We trained the experimental group in 4 sessions to master strategic planning. Then we selected 4…

To date, very little research on L2 peer review of L2 essay composition has focused on the issue of whether the choice of L1 or L2 use in the peer review process facilitates or hinders students' transmission and reception of productive commentary on their essay drafts. This study was designed to ascertain the impact of language choice in written…

This study used think-aloud protocols to compare essay-rating processes across holistic and analytic rating scales in the context of China's College English Test Band 6 (CET-6). A group of 9 experienced CET-6 raters scored the same batch of 10 CET-6 essays produced in an operational CET-6 administration twice, using both the CET-6 holistic…

This study investigates the potential for linguistic microfeatures related to length, complexity, cohesion, relevance, topic, and rhetorical style to predict L2 writing proficiency. Computational indices were calculated by two automated text analysis tools (Coh- Metrix and the Writing Assessment Tool) and used to predict human essay ratings in a…