Analysis of Cohesion and Coherence of Written Products by Reading Performance and Developmental Levels

Abstract

Introduction: Reading and writing are academic skills that should be given importance to the acquisition and development of students from the first step of their education life. It is stated in the literature that reading and writing contain similar processes, cognitive skills and contexts, and therefore reading skills have a positive relationship with writing skills. In this study, the cohesion and coherence of students' written products were examined depending on their reading performance and grade level. Method: The research was carried out with a comparative descriptive model, one of the quantitative research methods. In the study, the frequency of using cohesion items and the text coherence scores of 183 poor readers (fourth grade 50, sixth grade 71 and eighth grade 62) and 192 good readers (fourth grade 55, sixth grade 74 and eighth grade 63) in written products were examined by comparison. Informal Reading Inventory, a video prepared to remind the story structure and a silent movie were used to collect the data. In the analysis of the data, Mann Whitney U Tests were used for pairwise comparisons and Kruskal Wallis Tests were used for triple comparisons. Findings: Looking at the cohesion items, it is seen that poor readers in the fourth and eighth grades get lower scores than their peers who are good readers in reading skills. In addition, from the fourth to the eighth grade, it was observed that there was an improvement in the written products of the students with good reading skills in terms of cohesion items, while there was no significant improvement in the poor readers. Considering the coherence scores, it was seen that poor readers got lower scores than good readers at all grade levels, and students in both groups improved in terms of coherence scores in their written products from fourth to eighth grade. Discussion: It is seen that the problems of students with poor readers in using cohesion tools and their inability to create coherence texts may be due to the inadequacy of the students' language skills, that the students prefer to use short sentences in their writing exercises, they do not need to connect sentences, and the level of use of cohesion tools increases with the progress of their grade levels. It can be said that it is a research that has findings consistent with the findings of the studies in the literature.