cohesion

[James Cornish]

Zouhair Maalej wrote:

I think (it remains to be checked on actual data?) that substitution and
ellipsis are not equally
distributed in spoken and written discourse (cf. work done on orality
and literacy by Tannen and
others). I believe (I haven't read anything to this effect) that they
are more frequent in speech, which
may be the reason why you didn't find a significant occurrence of them
in your students'
compositions.

Zourhair:

Douglas Biber has done some really interesting work in corpus
linguistics that shows the issue of written/spoken discourse has a
dimensional quality, not co-referential.

But the real question in all of this is effect of my students' writing
on raters.  I had them holistically scored and am looking at a
correlation between the scores and the patterns of cohesive links
(Hoey's Patterns book).  The motivation for the study began as comments
from my fellow teachers of freshman composition about how essays "don't
make sense, wander, jump around."  (Which unfortunately marks us as
concentrating on the negative instead of looking for the good qualities
in our students' work, but...)  I had used Halliday's cohesive tie model
in another study into English as a Second Language (ESL) writers' use of
anaphoric ties and the possibility that (Korean) their sense of
rhetorical arrangement was different than an L1 American English
speaker.  There are differences, but the point of this is that I really
believe that there are some VERY interesting things to be seen in
examining discourse at the level of cohesion/coherence and tying that to
some sort of end-rating.