the development of cohesiveness in efl essays: a corpus-based study of lower and upper intermediate learners

Writing in a foreign language has long been a concern for learners and teachers as its development depends on learners’ progress in various aspects of communicative competence. appropriate organization and connectedness, as major dimensions of writing quality, are indicators of writers’ progress in this skill. there is, however, inadequate research on how cohesiveness, as realized in efl writing, develops through different stages of language proficiency. to shed light on this issue, we compared the various cohesiveness dimensions of the essays written by lower and upper intermediate iranian efl writers. to this end, 200 lower intermediate and 200 upper intermediate essays were analyzed using the coh-metrix software (graesser et al., 2011). ten cohesiveness indices were selected and explored. manova was employed to compare the two sets of essays in terms of cohesiveness. our findings revealed that the essays written by the lower group contained higher use of all the three indices related to connectives; content words overlap and argument overlap were also higher in the lower intermediate group. the other five indices including lsa given-new, lsa overlap for adjacent sentences, noun overlap, stem overlap and incidence of causal verbs were, however, higher in the upper intermediate essays. these results suggest that while cohesiveness of essays develops from lower intermediate to upper intermediate level, this development is not parallel across all dimensions of cohesiveness. it appears that upper intermediate writers use more meaning-based and lower intermediate writers use more mechanical ways of cohesiveness which indicates that development in cohesiveness is a matter of moving from using surface connective devices to more complicated semantic patterns of text organization. implications of this study for teaching, learning and assessing efl writing is discussed.