Developing writing skills meaningfully COHERENCE AND COHESION

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

Cohesion „…the use of explicit linguistic devices to signal relations between sentences and parts of texts." (Ulla Connor 1996 in 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.

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

Coherence 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

…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 Coherence…

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”. How to achieve coherence Learners’ awareness and skills can be developed to…

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