A Study On Correlation Between Coherence And Writing Quality In College Students Writing By Using Coh-Metrix

Coherence is one of the most crucial criteria for overall writing quality.Since the publication of Cohesion in English[1],the studies and theories on cohesion and coherence in writing have increased rapidly.Coherence is such an ambiguous construct that it is difficult to be quantified.Thereby,few studies explored coherence instead of a number of cohesive devices(CDs)despite the importance of coherence.It is possible and operable to measure coherence in writing with development and application of online text analyzers.Coh-Metrix,an online computational tool that measures a text from 106 textual indices,is the text analyzer utilized in this study and 36 out of 106 indices were selected for textual coherence analysis.The research corpus involves 145 English compositions submitted through the Pigai system in the event of "Big Writing Event Under One Topic" in 2017.However,106 compositions were selected as valid samples,for 39 were eliminated due to the word count requirement.The student writers were sophomores at the author's university from a variety of majors including electronic engineering,automation,computer science,economic administration,and English.The study attempts to address the following research questions:· If textual coherence measures local,global and text cohesion respectively,is there a significant correlation between textual coherence and writing quality?If yes,what are the coherence indices that have significant correlation with writing quality?· With regard to textual coherence in writing,are there any significant differences for English learners at different proficiency levels?· With regard to textual coherence in writing,are there any significant differences between English majors and non-English majors?The results from data analyses revealed that there is a significant correlation between textual coherence and writing quality given that text coherence covers local,global and text cohesion.The indices that demonstrated significant correlation with writing scores are three local cohesion indices,one global cohesion index as well as three text cohesion indices.The indices that showed significant correlation with writing quality are classified into five categories in Coh-Metrix,which are referential cohesion,syntactic complexity,Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA),lexical diversity and syntactic pattern diversity.In terms of students at different English proficiency levels,the significant difference existed between Level 1 group and Level 2 group in a local cohesion index reflecting syntactic complexity in Coh-Metrix which shows the number of modi:fiers per noun phrase.With regard to English majors and non-English majors,two indices reported significant difference between the two groups.They were a text cohesion index reflecting lexical diversity and a local cohesion reflecting syntactic complexity category in Coh-Metrix.The results and findings were explored to shed lights on English as a second language(ESL)writing research concerning textual coherence by using Coh-Metirx and to provide reference for perfection of traditional ESL writing instruction and improvement of students' writing performance.