THE MANIFESTATION OF COHESION AND COHERENCE IN THE WRITTEN ENGLISH OF PALESTINIAN SENIOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: A TEXTUAL ANALYTIC STUDY (a case study of AL-Quds University)

Abstract

Throughout his experience in teaching English to EFL students, and in his assessment of student writing, the researcher has identified a major and serious weakness in the students' ability to write cohesive and coherent essays. This weakness prevails at all student levels, even those university seniors whose major is English. This case study attempts mainly to explore this very important aspect of language use on the basis of the data of the study. It addresses and describes the difficulties relevant to cohesion and coherence in English writing by adopting a descriptive approach both quantitatively and qualitatively in the analysis of 30 essays written by 30 English major seniors studying at Al-Quds University in Palestine. The study, which comprises six chapters, has revealed the following results: 1. There is an astonishing degree of weakness in the students' ability to produce cohesive and coherent texts. 2. There is a very serious weakness in the students' manifestation of the following rhetorical and linguistic features: Cohesion (local): reference, conjunction, lexical, ellipsis, and substitution Coherence (global): A: Text-Topicality: development, focus, relevance, and continuity B: Text-Typology: organization, deviation and parallelism or balance 3. There are statistically significant differences in the number and use of cohesive devices in texts written by those students. 4. There is no statistically significant correlation between the number of cohesive devices used in texts written by those students and the quality of those students' writing performance in general. 5. There are statistically significant differences within the students' writing performance at the cohesion and coherence levels. 6. There are statistically significant differences within the students' writing performance both in class and at home. 7. There are no statistically significant differences within the students' writing skillfulness at the performance level and at the cognitive level. 8. There are no statistically significant differences among the students' writing abilities both at the performance level and the cognitive level due to gender. The researcher would like to assert that this very important aspect of weakness should be taken and treated very seriously by school teachers, university instructors, syllabus-designers and decision-makers altogether. 1) Teachers in general should devote more time, effort and attention to the writing skill so as to improve their students' production of cohesive and coherent texts through focusing equally on the inter-sentential and intra-sentential levels of writing. 2) Teachers should not be tolerant of their students' mistakes and slow progress during the teaching process in a way that motivates them to accept the writing lessons as a free and lively experience. 3) Teachers should train their students to use cohesive devices through focusing on both the grammatical and semantic conventions of academic writing. 4) Teachers should be devoted to their career, and they should be keen to improve their teaching expertise through attending workshops and reading the most up-to-date references on methodology. 5) Syllabus-designers at the Ministry of Education should regularly revise the content of the English syllabus employed in schools in Palestine so as enhance the students' language skills in general and the writing skill in particular. 6) Decision-makers at the Palestinian universities should reconsider the standards of admission to the departments of English so as to ensure the best quality of students who wish to study English majors.