A Coh-Metrix Based Study Of Cohesion And Coherence In English Majors’ Expository Writing

Coherence is a crucial factor in judging writing proficiency,which has been studied from various perspectives in previous studies.Yet it remains a difficult aspect to be improved in EFL students’ writing,thus an important issue to be discussed further.The genres of students’ writings studied in previous studies are mostly argumentative or narrative.Their expository writing has not received adequate attention yet.What’s more,researchers have not reached agreement on the correlation between the use of cohesive devices and Chinese students’ English writing quality.Therefore,the cohesion and coherence in expository writing and their correlation with the writing quality need to be studied.Coh-Metrix is a free tool on the web which can automatically analyze the coherence of English texts with its cohesion indices,which has been widely adopted by researchers for evaluating students’ writing.The present data was collected from the preliminary contest of a national college English writing contest.The expository writings were classified into three proficiency levels according to the scores and categorized into two groups based on the lexical diversity.This study analyzed the features of coherence in expositions written by students of English majors and their correlation with writing quality with the employment of Coh-Metrix to address the following research questions:1)What are the characteristics of coherence in Chinese English majors’ expository writings? What cohesive devices are used to achieve coherence?2)What are the differences in coherence and the use of cohesive devices between the writings of different proficiency levels and groups?3)What is the correlation between the coherence and the quality of the expository writings of EFL students? What measures can be used to predict the quality of writings?Results show that referential cohesions and latent semantic overlap proved to be two distinctive measures in evaluating the coherence of expository writing and can help predict the scores of expositions written by English majors.Meanwhile,content overlap and latent semantic overlaps at paragraph level show significant negative correlation with writing quality in expositions with high lexical diversity.However,temporal connectives,though not frequently used,are positively correlated to the scores of writing.