Putting Cohesion in Its Place : Justifications for Teaching Sentence Cohesion in EFL Writing Classes

Putting Cohesion in Its Place : Justifications for Teaching Sentence Cohesion in EFL Writing Classes

This paper seeks to examine why cohesion should not be marginalized in EFL writing in terms of clear communication between readers and writers. A text's clarity depends, to a large extent, on the degree to which the text is coherent. The extent of coherence then concerns the writer's ability to connect the ideas across sentences, that is, sentence cohesion. This type of ability appears to be an essential component of good writing, in that writers and readers normally do not shape a shared context due to the absence of immediacy of face-to-face interaction between them It is argued that creating a framework of shared context in written discourse is no easy task for EFL writers. This paper indicates that EFL writers need to be aware of the role of cohesion in producing a good piece of writing. Particularly, those writers should be helped to realize why cohesion matters in writing in terms of making a text more reader-friendly.