Written narratives as an index of L2 competence in Korean EFL learners

The use of cohesive devices in argumentative writing by Chinese EFL learners at different proficiency levels

“…Kang (2005) compared the cohesive devices in the compositions of American students as opposed to those of Korean EFL learners and showed that Korean students overused some reference devices. The case was the same with the essays composed by Bulgarian ESL learners (see, e.g., Blagoeva, 2004).…”

“…Both Blagoeva and Kang contended that L1 interference might be responsible for redundant or inappropriate use of certain cohesive devices in ESL/EFL writing. It is, nevertheless, noteworthy that although much have been done to survey inappropriate use of cohesive items in ESL/EFL writing, most of the studies merely provided a sketchy description of the problems pertinent to cohesion rather than presented elaborated classification of cohesion errors (e.g., Liu & Braine, 2005), centered around learners of single proficiency level instead of checking the change features in cohesion problems produced by learners of distinct proficiencies (Kang, 2005;Zhang, 2000), or offered a little bit over-generalized pedagogical suggestions without propounding the specific cohesion errors that may warrant heed in the future research and pedagogy (e.g., Liu & Braine, 2005).…”

“…Being an indispensable textual property, cohesion, the grammatical and lexical glue of discourse (Celce-Murcia, 1991), aids in the formation of textual/discourse competence (see, e.g., Bachman, 1990;Canale, 1983;Canale & Swain, 1980), the ability to handle language above the sentence or to structure a series of sentences as a meaningful whole, which has been increasingly deemed in the SLA field as one of the most important constituent abilities that contribute to a language learner's overall proficiency (e.g., Bachman & Palmer, 1982;Harley, Cummins, Swain, & Allen, 1990). In reality, textual/discourse competence has been valued over the production of basic intrasentential elements like vocabularies or isolated syntactic forms by researchers in recent L2 writing research (e.g., Chiang, 2003;Liu & Braine, 2005), given that becoming a competent user of a target language involves more than interiorizing its essential linguistic forms (Kang, 2005), e.g., vocabulary and grammar, and that only through the analysis of learners' output of the linguistic units beyond words and sentences can inquirers offer a valid and reliable portrait of whether and how the learners command the target language. In other words, analyzing L2 writers' change features in (incorrect) using cohesive agents at different proficiency levels can provide more informative insights into their strengths and weaknesses in their learner language variations, especially those at the textual level which may intently relate to the overall proficiency of their learner language.…”

Referencing in a Second Language: Korean EFL Learners' Cohesive Use of References in Written Narrative Discourse

“…The data used in this study were presented in a previous publication (Kang, 2005) concerning Korean EFL learners' ability to use cohesive devices as a whole (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), as well as to mark written registrar through written discourse features in their narrative compositions. It included only quantitative analyses of these linguistic features, as well as conjunctions, lexical cohesive devices, and substitution, but without more detailed and focused analysis and discussion of referential expressions.…”

Toward Finding an Approach for Improving Rhetorical Organization of EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writing

“…As such, there is scarcity of research on finding out a way to increase rhetorical awareness of learners while composing in L2. The challenges of accommodating L2 academic rhetorical patterns in learners' writing continue to be reported in the literature (Fishman & McCarthy, 2001;Freedman, 1987Freedman, , 1993Kang, 2005). Moreover, Mu and Carrington (2007) state that, unlike other aspects of L1 writing, rhetorical strategies may not positively transfer to the L2.…”