Developing reading materials tailored to the specific needs and proficiency levels of students is important yet challenging for educators and teachers. Current data-driven indices assisting this task primarily focus on lexical and syntactic text features, often overlooking text cohesion, a key discourse feature impacting reading comprehension. To…

This study examines how three age-on-arrival (AOA) groups of Chinese-background ESL students use two types of cohesive devices on a standardized essay exam. A discourse analysis of 90 first-year students' expository writing samples was conducted to ascertain how factors such as first language (L1) and length of residence (LOR) in Canada influence…

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…