Abstract
Coherence instruction has long played a significant role in the writing classroom since many learners, even with a good command of grammatical knowledge, still lack the ability to compose fluent and well-organized essays. Although the importance of coherence in writing has been recognized in most EFL or ESL writing textbooks, it is mainly introduced or represented as a list of transitional devices. Learners, therefore, have a deficiency in their knowledge of coherence and display limited ability in writing more effectively and successfully. Due to the possibility of insufficiency in teaching as well as the need to uncover a heuristic tool which could help our learners handle coherence problems, this study focuses on evaluating the efficacy of giving instruction in Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) as a revision strategy. Data included multi-dimensional questionnaires and essays. Forty EFL graduate students in the fields of Science and Engineering were divided into the control and experimental group. Twenty-five students in the experimental group were introduced to the TSA, receiving in-class practice in identifying T-units, selecting topics and comments, and determining different types of progressions in a discourse. They were required to apply TSA in their revision process. Their writing essays, including drafts and revisions were analyzed to investigate whether or not there was any modification in the topical progressions. The essays were further compared between groups with special attention paid to students’ performance in the scoring of coherence and overall writing quality. In addition to the writing samples, questionnaires about learners’ English writing learning experiences and their perspectives and difficulties regarding TSA instruction were elicited via questionnaires and interviews. The findings show that students receiving instruction in TSA had better performance on topical progressions. In the revised essays, more proportions and better quality parallel progressions, sequential progressions, and extended parallel progressions were found to contribute to better overall coherence. In regard to students’ attitudes toward and perceptions of learning this self-revision strategy, students report positive feedback in terms of learning and applying TSA. Many of them reported that TSA helps them to reorganize the essay as well as to examine coherence between sentences. Moreover, in terms of the guidance given by this strategy, they are more aware of the relations between sentence topics and the overall discourse topics. In addition to the positive findings for students’ changes in information organization, the results indicate that instruction in TSA results in students’ awareness of coherent writing as well as motivating them to become more responsible writers. The results gathered from the revising strategy questionnaire show that students with the TSA instruction display different attitudes in the revising process. Instead of merely depending on teachers’ comments and guidance, students participate in the revising process more actively and are inspired to interpret coherence using a new perspective. The results of the study may not only shed light on EFL writing, but also contribute toward the understanding of this discourse-based approach as an alternative teaching and learning device for coherent writing.