A functional approach to the teaching of coherence in argumentative writing

Lum, W. K. B. (2006). A functional approach to the teaching of coherence in argumentative writing (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://libris.nie.edu.sg/

Background

This study was motivated by the author’s strong interest in understanding how the Functional Approach to writing could be used to help students improve coherence in their writing. The Functional Approach to writing is based on Halliday’s systemic grammar and related approaches to teaching.

Aims

This study investigates whether the explicit teaching of the schematic structure of argumentative texts and the use of cohesive devices could help students improve coherence in their writing.

Sample

A class of 38 Secondary 3 students from one school in Singapore participated in the study. English was not the students’ dominant language and they had no prior argumentative writing experience.

Method

The intervention was modelled after genre instruction and consisted of three stages: modelling, joint negotiation, and the independent construction of text. The schematic structure taught to the students was as follows: (a) thesis statement, (b) series of arguments, and (c) conclusion. Students wrote pre- and post-intervention essays. The essays of six students were analysed and their coherence judged based on clausal relations and cohesive devices. Clausal relations included thesis-argument relations, and argument-elaboration relations. Cohesive devices included reference, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. To determine coherence, the researcher looked at the number of cohesive devices correctly used in both the pre- and post-tests and the links between the clauses.

Findings

The findings showed that explicit teaching helped the students to form a clear thesis statement and arguments that were well linked. All the students improved in their ability to develop an elaboration that was linked to the main argument in the paragraph. The greatest improvement saw an increase of 17 such links. The coherence of the essays in their entirety, as quantitatively measured through the number of cohesive devices, also improved. Four students employed 12.6% to 54.7% more cohesive devices in their post-test essays. The number of conjunctions used increased for five students, with the greatest increase being 13 conjunctions. Scoring the coherence of the essay on a scale from 0 to 5, three raters judged all essays to have improved.

Implications

The author concluded that there was strong evidence that the Functional Approach had a positive impact on the coherence of the students’ argumentative writing, and recommended that schools adopt this model of genre instruction.

Original article retrieved from NIE Digital Repository.