Abstract
Among all the criteria of English writing, coherence is claimed to be the most abstract but essential, whose subcomponents and characteristics are difficult to analyze and describe. It thus gives instructors a hard time explaining to learners as well as planning effective pedagogical activities; it also seems inaccessible to learners while composing and revising. Therefore, the present study aims to explore the effect of teaching a revision strategy, an enhanced version of Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) to promote advanced EFL writers’ understanding on the essence of coherence by involving them in hands-on analyzing experiences, through which they can identify their own weakness and further improve coherence in writing. Topical structure refers to the relationship among sequences of sentence topics in text and how they work together throughout the discourse to establish a unified meaning gradually. Three topical progressions among an article are identified: parallel (PP), sequential (SP) and extended parallel progressions (EPP). In parallel progression (PP), the topics in serial sentences are identical or synonymous. Sequential progression (SP) takes different topics in successive sentences, and some of the topics are comments from previous sentences. In extended parallel progression (EPP), two semantically identical topics are interrupted by at least one sequential progression. The research was based on both within- and between- group designs, which was basically modified from the scheme of Fan (2008). The participants of the study were two classes of English major sophomores, with 15 students in each. The experimental group was introduced the concept of TSA. Our instruction was firstly centered on the relationship between discourse topic and sentence topics and then moved to the semantic relations carried among sentence topics. Exercises were given to identify sentence topics and comments, determining sentence progression in samples, and in due course the lexical cohesion was brought in to help the analysis of the semantic relationship among topics. In-class discussion of how the samples should be revised was conducted and students were required to apply the technique to their own revising processes. In contrast, the control group only revised based on the comment given by the instructor. Students’ essays before and after the revision were rated and compared to see which group gain more score in general writing quality as well as in coherence after the revision. The experimental group’s essays were analyzed additionally on a scale tailored for topical structure to examine whether they improve coherence in terms of topical unity and whether they develop the discourse topics in a more sophisticated way. In addition, the group was required to apply the strategy to their next assignment and it was compared with the first essay written at the beginning of the study, which aimed to examine if our previous instruction was sufficient for the students to apply the strategy independently. Besides students’ essays, questionnaires were distributed to survey students’ perspectives on the revising strategy and whether it promoted their awareness of their own idea progressions and of the elements of textual coherence. The results demonstrated that the experimental group not only improved the general impression of unity, but also achieved better performance in the coherence internal to each paragraph than their peers in control group. They became clearer about the paragraph main idea they intended to convey, and were better able to modify ill-developed supporting ideas by further providing necessary information to complete the development. Furthermore, some ambiguously- connected ideas were pinpointed and the gaps among their meaningful relations were bridged by giving transitional sentences. These improvements were reflected in the different patterns of topical progressions in students’ two versions of writing. Significantly more PP appeared in their revisions to add more details onto those important ideas by repetitively mentioning them as topics. A slight drop in the percentages of unrelated progression (UP) and superstructure (SUPER) was identified and found to greatly influence the connectedness of ideas. Besides, the strategy was found to not only work during the instructional sessions where intensive attention was given, but had somewhat lasting effect that kept helping students improve coherence three weeks later. In addition, the questionnaire response also revealed students’ general positive perception of the strategy. Most students agreed that TSA helped them to be better aware of the coherence in their writing and that it gave them a tangible way for self-revision in which they can approach the coherence problem level by level. The follow-up interviews showed the somewhat different opinions on the technique held by writers of different writing proficiency.