The development and use of cohesive devices in L2 writing and their relations to judgments of essay quality

•Study reports on the growth of cohesion features in L2 writers.•Study examines growth in conjunction with ratings of writing organization and quality.•L2 writers showed increased cohesion over the course of a semester.•Predictive features of human judgments different from those of growth.

An important topic in writing research has been the use of cohesive features. Much of this research has focused on local and text cohesion. The few studies that have studied global cohesion have been restricted to first language writing. This study investigates the development of local, global, and text cohesion in the writing of 57 s language (L2) university students and examines the effects of these cohesion types on judgments of L2 writing quality Growth is observed in the use of a number of local, global, and text cohesive features across a semester-long upper-level English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. Local, global, and text features also predicted whether an essay was written at the beginning or the end of the semester with an accuracy of 71%. In addition, the use of local, global, and text cohesive features explains 36% of the variance in human judgments of text cohesion and 42% of the variance in overall judgments of writing quality. This study has important implications for second language acquisition, writing development, and writing pedagogy.