The Use of Cohesive Devices in L1 L2 Writing and Their Relation to Judgments of Essay Quality

An intriguing and perennial topic in writing which has attracted the attention of many scholars is the use and effects of cohesive devices. This has turned out far more significant in the L2 context where cohesive features serve both the internal conceptual function and quality judgment purpose to be passed by L2 writing teachers. To delineate the issue further, the present investigation was intended to unravel and compare use of L1-L2 writing cohesive features and also the effects that they exert on the teachers’ criterial decisions with respect to the quality of writing. A careful analysis of the associated trajectory in the English language writing of L1 and L2, though the former has been peripherally dealt with, demonstrates that L1 and L2 compositions are differently constructed in terms of local, global and also the text related cohesive features, with L2 writers inclined towards greater reliance on such features to get their messages across properly. Further, the present state of research reveals that L1 writers inversely reduce their dependence on the use of cohesive devices through incremental improvement of their proficiency, thus factoring out these features in favor of apparently greater intertextuality links. Unsurprisingly, L2 composition teachers also follow in the same footsteps and afford more credit to the local, global and text cohesion features while the statistical analysis in various contexts of L1 teachers shows a very low variance of the cohesion features at work to explain the overall judgments on writing quality. This investigation has important implications for contrastive rhetoric, L1-L2 writing theory, writing quality judgment, and writing pedagogy in general.