Coherence, cohesion and comments on students’ academic essays

This study investigates the relationships between connectedness in discourse and the in-text comments that tutors write on postgraduate essays at a Thai university. Connectedness was divided into cohesion, propositional coherence and interactional coherence which were analysed using Hoey's lexical analysis [Hoey, M. (1991). Patterns of lexis in text. Oxford: Oxford University Press], topical structure analysis and genre analysis respectively. From these analyses, text-level features of connectedness and points in the assignments which are potentially problematic in terms of connectedness were identified, and these were compared against the tutors’ comments. The findings show very little relationship between the analyses of connectedness and the tutors’ comments. The non-results may be due to the constructs of connectedness analysed, the methods of analysis, the data, or the lack of any clear relationship between the tutors’ comments and the quality of the texts as measured by grades.