Discourse Connectors and Cohesion in Writing

The aim of this study was to find out the relationship between use of discourse connectors and cohesion of writing1 in the writing samples of Malaysian school students. Thirty samples from each educational level (Form 4; Form 5; College; N=30) were chosen randomly from the Malaysian Corpus of Students’ Argumentative Writing. To assess the quality of the essays, two experienced raters, who were PhD holders in ELT, were asked to use ESL Composition Profile (Jacob’s et al., 1981). Although the rubric checks for five components, including content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanics, in order to address to the purpose of the study only “Organization” marks were taken in to account since it is an only component which measures cohesion of an essay. The reliability test result showed that inter-rater reliability was very high (was 0.90). The analyses indicated that there was a very weak negative correlation, but insignificant, between writing quality and the frequency of the use of the DCs in the writing of Malaysian ESL students. The findings of the study will also be discussed in detail. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3s2p44