Improving ESL/EFL Learners' Writing Skills With The Help Of Cohesion

Most ESL/EFL learners are unaware of the role played by the reader in writing when they begin to writer in English. They write for the teacher, i.e. to take the teacher as the one and only one reader. They wrongly believe that good writing means superficial structure and grammatical correctness. The reason for this false belief is that these learners fail to realize the ultimate goal of writing is to communicate.Writing is a dialogue between the writer and the absent reader. In order to create a readable text, the writer should always take the reader into consideration and try to make readers interpret the text with clues provided by the writer. In this paper, the author argues that cohesion plays a very important role in text construction and the employment of cohesive devices or discourse markers in writing will facilitate the reader in understanding the text with less effort.Cohesion is closely related to coherence and contributes a lot to writing a coherent text. In the process of teaching writing, the students under the teacher's instruction should be aware of the role of cohesion in writing and try to guide readers to understand the text with the deliberate use of cohesive devices.