Abstract
Coherence is considered one of the characteristics of effective writing. Topical structure analysis (TSA) has been taught to students as a revision strategy to raise their awareness of importance of textual coherence and helps them clearly understand its concept. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of TSA instruction in improving university students’ writing quality and to explore the proportions of topical progression in essays written by high and low proficiency students. It also examined the opinions of the students on TSA instruction. The participants consisted of two groups of 20 third year students majoring English Education at Chiangrai Rajabhat University. Data were collected through the pretest and the posttest of essay writing, two selected essays of high and low proficiency students, a questionnaire and an interview. The results indicated that TSA instruction had a significantly positive effect on students’ writing quality. More specifically, TSA instruction was more beneficial to the low proficiency students than the high proficiency ones. Further, both successful and less succesful students employed the sequential progression the most in the essays. The students had positive opinions on TSA instruction.
Highlights
Coherence has long been considered by many researchers as important quality of effective writing as it involved the global and logical meaning of the text and logical relations of the text (Bamberg, 1984; Grabe & Kaplan, 1996; Lee, 2002)
When asked how Topical structure analysis (TSA) instruction was helpful to their writing, the participants stated that practicing TSA was beneficial to their writing skill
It was a self-revision strategy which helped them understand the concept of textual coherence more clearly
Summary
Coherence has long been considered by many researchers as important quality of effective writing as it involved the global and logical meaning of the text and logical relations of the text (Bamberg, 1984; Grabe & Kaplan, 1996; Lee, 2002). A commonly identified problem of textual coherence in students’ writing is digression, in which students include irrelevant examples or inappropriate supporting ideas in their writing (Strid, 1998). Writing composed by ESL/EFL students is frequently considered disorganized and incoherent. It appears to be the result of the traditional approach to teaching writing which teachers tend to. This leads ESL/EFL students to focus more on the surface features instead of the discourse features of writing (Ferris & Hedgcock, 1998; Grabe & Kaplan, 1996; Hyland, 2007; Myers, 1997). It is essential that textual coherence should be taught explicitly to help ESL/EFL students vividly understand its concept and be able to produce a good composition
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