Page 293 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

Rhetorical Features of Text: Cohesion and Coherence
OVERVIEW
• Cohesive ties and lexical substitution
• Teaching lexical and semantic cohesion
• Expanding the range: lexical synonyms,near synonyms,and gen-
eral words
• Phrase-level conjunctions
• Following the laws of parallel structure
• Sentence transitions and idea connectors
• Complex prepositions
• Clarifying and giving examples
• Structures not to use or to use sparingly
• Punctuation
This chapter addresses a number of rhetorical features of L2 academicwrit- ing, largely focusing on those that specifically require additional attention in L2 writing instruction. In particular various studies have noted that in ac- ademic writing cohesion represents an important characteristic of text and discourse flow and that for L2 learners constructing cohesive texts requires focused instruction and additional attention (Byrd & Reid, 1998; Carrell, 1982; Hinkel, 2001a, 2002a; Ostler, 1987; Reid, 1993).
In general terms, cohesion refers to the connectivity of ideas in discourse and sentences to one another in text, thus creating the flow of information in a unified way. In addition, in textbooks on writing and composition, co- hesion can also refer to the ways of connecting sentences and paragraphs into a unified whole. Although the terms cohesion and coherence are often used together, they do not refer to the same properties of text and discourse. Cohesion usually refers to connections between sentences and paragraphs,
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