These Students Can’t Write: An Examination of Cohesion and Coherence in Essays Written by the University of Botswana ESL Undergraduate Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
University lecturers in English as a Second Language (ESL) contexts are generally concerned about their students’ writing incompetence. Similarly, at the University of Botswana (UB) lecturers are usually heard saying that “these students cannot write”. Previous research attributes problems of writing to, among others, students’ lack of mastery of academic writing conventions, inability to analyse topics, and poor sentence skills. These problems undoubtedly contribute to the lack of cohesion and coherence in the students’ written essays. The focus of this study, therefore, was to investigate the cohesion and coherence of the essays written by the UB first year undergraduate Social Sciences students by specifically: a) Investigating the type of cohesive devices used in the essays. b) Identifying the problems of cohesion in the essays. c) Examining the coherence problems in the essays. d) Identifying other writing problems in the students’ essays. The terms cohesion and coherence in the context of this study briefly refer to the linguistic, organizational and semantic connectedness, readability, meaningfulness and relevance of a text or essay as perceived by the authors of this study who are experts in this field. A mixed research design of analyzing the essays and orally interviewing the students was adopted in this study to identify the cohesive devices used in them. The findings of this study were informed by Halliday and Hassan’s (1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices and their framework. The findings revealed that conjunctions and reference were used more frequently than substitution, vocabulary, and ellipsis. Other writing problems identified in the essays include the use of informal language, overlong sentences, redundancy, run-on sentences, fused sentences, comma splices, sentence fragments, awkward and/or meaningless sentences, and use of wrong words.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".