Page 294 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

280 CHAPTER 11
and coherence can also refer to the organization of discourse with all ele- ments present and fitting together logically. For example, the presence of an introduction, a thesis statement, rhetorical support, and a conclusion can create a coherent essay that is not necessarily cohesive (Carrell, 1982; Chafe, 1994; Scollon & Scollon, 2001).
Since the 1970s, a great deal of research has been carried out into the ef- fects of features of text on discourse. Many studies have determined what syntactic and lexical constructions are used in writing, and how and when they are used alters the text's clarity, cohesion, contextual and social accept- ability, and communicative effectiveness (Coulthard, 1985; de Beaugrande & Dressier, 1972; Halliday & Hasan, 1976; van Dijk, 1985, 1997).
The descriptions of a text's qualities, however, are constructed in abstract terms, and it is not always possible to define text clarity, cohesion, or effective- ness with any degree of precision. Any two well-educated native English speakers may disagree (and often do) about whether a particular textwritten in English is clear, cohesive, or developed. On the other hand, when it comes to L2 text written in English by non-native speakers, the imprecise terms in which the text's qualities are described acquire a whole new meaning.
As with other instructional fundamentals discussed at length in this book, the teacher's objective is not to try to develop learners' skills to write sharp journalistic prose or artful essays composed with grace, originality, and eloquence. Nevertheless, ESL teachers should not be satisfied with a quality of text that will doom the student to failure or barely passing grades in writing assignments in mainstream classes.
To this end, the approach to teaching cohesion, conjunctions, and the functions of prepositions and examples relies on concrete guidelines that are relatively easy for teachers to teach and writers to use in their written as- signments, papers, essays, and reports, which are required in all academic disciplines and of all students.
The rhetorical features of academic text addressed in this chapter pre- dominantly discuss matters of lexical and semantic cohesion, the syntactic and discourse functions of phrase coordinators, sentence transitions, as well as the appropriate types of examples in academic writing and areas where NNS writers typicallyencounter difficulties. Numerous studies of L2writ- ten prose have pointed to the fact that these specific features of L2 text can benefit from specific and focused instruction.
COHESIVE TIES AND LEXICAL SUBSTITUTION
The terms cohesive ties (chains) and lexical substitution were originally devel- oped by Halliday and Hasan (1976) to explain how cohesive elements act to conjoin text by direct reference to (or substitution for) another lexical item in the immediately preceding sentence. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesive chains can refer back to not just the immediately preceding sen-
TLFeBOOK