English language department, faculty of education investigating coherence and cohesion in writing English composition

Abstract EN

This study focused on investigating third level university students’ coherence and cohesion in writing English composition, The case study of this research was the students of Alzaiem Alazhari University, University of Bahri, University of Khartoum and Omdurman Islamic University in order to reveal the obstacles encountered by Sudanese university EFL learners when writing English composition and their potential contribution to the pedagogical purposes.

The problem of this study emerged from university students’ inability to produce a coherent and cohesive text when comparing their performances in a pre-writing test and a post one.

Sudanese university students suffered a lot and are still suffering from the problem of expressing their ideas, opinions, thoughts and feelings in a coherent and cohesive way when they come to write any piece of writing.

It may be useful for both university EFL learners and English teachers; this study is significantly important because it helped teachers to make use of the feedback got from the field.

The aim of this study was to find to which extent that the Sudanese university students could produce a coherent and cohesive text in writing composition.

The more diverse the teaching techniques the better teaching writing results are.

The study aimed at developing and managing the university EFL learners to write competently, coherently, meaningfully and using the transitional words properly.

Moreover it aimed to measure the students’ competence in using cohesive devices and mechanics of writing, besides providing them with cues and remedial work in order to write more logically and in a well-sequenced way.

A descriptive analytical approach was followed in conducting this study.

The results obtained indicated the necessity of using remedial work when teaching composition to university EFL learners.

It was found that free-writing tasks were more complicated and challenging for them.

For many university students writing is considered as a daunting task and it needs careful planning and more information about the subject matter.

The failure to write coherently and cohesively is a result of the students’ inability to sequence the events chronologically and logically.

It is quite impossible to have good learners gaining knowledge without offering them the sufficient opportunities of practicing writing.

The study strongly recommended the necessity of teaching the university students the transitional words, tenses and providing them with more authentic materials and this would ease the situation for them to perform better when they write a composition.

It also strongly recommended the importance of using the supplementary and remedial work when teaching the students how to write an English composition.

The researcher would very much like seeing other scholars investigate the communicative approach on developing university EFL learners writing performance.