Developing writing skills meaningfully for life and for

Developing writing skills meaningfully: for life and for the Euro exams COHERENCE AND COHESION Rádai Péter Euro Nyelvvizsga Központ peter. radai@euroexam. org

Coherent or cohesive? Incoherent and not cohesive? Coherent and cohesive? Coherent but not cohesive? Cohesive but incoherent?

Cohesion „…the use of explicit linguistic devices to signal relations between sentences and parts of texts. " (Ulla Connor 1996 in http: //www. criticism. com/da/coherence. php) All the grammatical and lexical links that establish connections within a text at all sorts of different levels, e. g. , section, paragraphs, sentences and even phrases.

Cohesion is… • a formal feature of texts • • • the glue that holds a piece of writing together fairly objectively verifiable achieved through cohesive devices: 1. 2. 3. 4. reference (it, this, those cars, neither etc. ) ellipsis (i. e. avoiding repetition: ) substitution (i. e. avoiding repetition: one(s), do) lexical cohesion (e. g. repetition of lexis, synonyms, reformulation) 5. conjunction (in addition, for instance etc. )

Coherence is a semantic property of discourse formed through the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences, with "interpretation" implying interaction between the text and the reader. (Teun A. van Dijk 1980 in http: //www. criticism. com/da/coherence. php)

Coherence… …is the extent to which the reader (or listener) is able to infer the writer’s (or speaker’s) communicative intentions …shows how meanings and sequences of ideas relate to each other, e. g. • general > particular • statement > example • problem > solution • question> answer • argument > counter-argument

How to achieve coherence Scott Thornbury: http: //www. onestopenglish. com/section. asp? doc. Id=154867 Learners’ awareness and skills can be developed to… 1. write coherent texts through the analysis of the generic features of particular text types; 2. establish both the purpose of the text and the intended readership; 3. second-guess the intended reader’s questions, and to answer them „beforehand”.

Helping teachers & learners www. euroexam. org: Írásbeli értékelő verseny Writing tutorials: raising awareness without writing http: //elearning. euroexam. org/

Assessing cohesion and coherence… Writing: Evaluation criteria Points / Weight TASK ACHIEVEMENT (sense of audience and purpose) 10 pts (40%) COHERENCE AND COHESION (sense of discourse) 5 pts (20%) RANGE AND ACCURACY 5 pts (20%) APPROPRIACY {style, genre} (sense of audience and discourse) 5 pts (20%)

References Connor, U. M. 1996. Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second Language Writing. Cambridge: CUP. Thornbury, S. 2006. An A-Z of ELT. Oxford: Macmillan. Thornbury, S. 2005. Beyond the Sentence. Oxford: Macmillan. van Dijk, T. A. 1980. Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman.