Cross-Cultural and Cross-Proficiency Analysis of Selected Cohesion Indices in Student Essays

• Main Author: Morallo, Audrey Buenavista
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2024
• Subjects: cohesion; cohesion indices; L2 writing; intercultural communication; Applied Linguistics; Discourse and Text Linguistics; First and Second Language Acquisition; Language and Literacy Education
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/jeal/vol3/iss1/7; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/jeal/article/1100/viewcontent/6morallo.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Cohesion is important in writing because of its role in writing quality development (Abdi Tabari & Johnson, 2023) and in making texts comprehensible (Ghasemi, 2013). It can differentiate between proficient and deficient writing (Crossley et al., 2016b, 2019), demonstrating its use as an index of language proficiency. Despite being an index of proficiency, little is known about cohesion use in L2 contexts (Abdi Tabari & Johnson, 2023; Crossley, 2020; Crossley et al., 2016a). To address this, this study investigated the use of connectives, givenness, and lexical overlap in essays from the Philippines, Singapore, and China available in a corpus. A freely available text analysis tool was employed to compute the cohesion values of the essays based on the three indices. Although the relationships found were generally weak, the quantitative analysis revealed that connective use was in line with the literature results, while data on givenness and lexical overlap contradicted previous findings. Chinese students also used more connectives, givenness, and lexical overlap than Filipinos and Singaporeans. These findings can be traced to Holliday’s (1999) large and small cultures. Pedagogical implications and future research directions are also discussed.