Cognitive Construction Of Discourse Coherence And Its Application To EFL Writing

As a conceptual construct,coherence is the conceptual unity dynamically constructed from the meaning relations underlying a discourse in the process of discourse comprehension.As previous studies tend to be more formal and static,studies of the cognitive and dynamic approach are inadequate in addressing the cognitive and especially the dynamic nature of coherence.To make up for this deficiency,a cognitive framework for coherence construction is proposed,which is based on theories of Cognitive Grammar,Relevance Theory,and Macrostructure to fully account for the nature of coherence in discourse comprehension.The essence of the framework is that the construction of coherence originates from the interaction between profiling/discursive focusing(DF)of lower-level construction and DF of higher-level construction.The cognitive effect of this interaction imposed on discourse receiver directly leads to a coherent or an incoherent mental representation of the discourse.This interaction effect is either positive or negative,with the former contributing to coherence and the latter incoherence.Positive effect means profiling/DF of lower-level construction elaborates DF of higher-level construction,including relations such as specification,explanation,exemplification,consequence,etc.Or,from the perspective of global to local,DF of higher-level discourse units exerts control or coercion on profiling/DF of the lower one;while for the negative one,it represents that profile/DF of lower construction contradicts or ill-expounds DF of the higher one,including relations like contradiction,inadequate argumentation,repetition,etc.Or,DF fails to control profiling/DF of lower-level constructions,leading to the stray of local discourse units.Since discourse is composite,and interaction occurs in the process of discourse comprehension,there are at least three levels of interaction,whose cognitive effects have their imports on the coherence construction.With the sequence of the interaction significance for coherence construction,four degrees of coherence are defined,namely,coherent,less coherent,less incoherent,and incoherent.Based on this framework,a Coherence Scoring Guide is designed to test the application of the framework in the corpus of English as Foreign Language(EFL)argumentative writings and to find out incoherence problems in it.The corpus is made up of 77 pieces of argumentative essay written by freshmen at the same level of English proficiency of a key university in Fujian.Two trained raters carry out the corpus rating,based on which the corpus is classified into three groups(perfect-score,higher-score and lower-score).Thus,a discourse analysis on the coherent pattern in the perfect-score group and incoherent problems of the higher-and lower-score group is conducted.The proposed framework proves to be valid in addressing the nature of coherence in terms of EFL argumentative writing,implying the feasibility and applicability of the framework to other text types.However,this framework is not perfect,for it fails to recognize the role of discourse structure of the text type,leading to the inconsideration of some incoherent problems.To fully account for the nature of coherence construction in argumentative writing,the framework is then revised to incorporate the factor of discourse structure.The significance of the study is threefold.Theoretically,it contributes to the exploration of the nature of coherence,and the dynamic aspect in particular.Moreover,this study paves the way for achieving an integrated view of structure,processing,and discourse in CG.Pedagogically,this exploration of coherence brings implications on EFL writing,where the coherent problem is of great concern.