The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

This study investigates the relationships between connectedness in discourse and the in-text comments that tutors write on postgraduate essays at a Thai university. Connectedness was divided into cohesion, propositional coherence and interactional coherence which were analysed using Hoey's lexical analysis [Hoey, M. (1991). "Patterns of lexis…

A study to find patterns of cohesion and rhetorical structure that distinguish good from weak English essay writing is described. The corpus consisted of ten Swedish college essays written as part of the final exam in a first-year English course. Methodological problems encountered included the delimitation of units for the analysis of cohesive…