Author(s)

He Dong

Corresponding Author

He Dong

Abstract

Current curriculum design for ESL (English as a second language) learners seem to ignore language coherence in China (Peng, 2016). ESL teachers seem to put emphasis on sentences themselves (vocabularies, sentence structures, grammars etc.) instead of language consistency. However, language coherence is an important standard for evaluating writing quality (Higgins et al. 2004), even the most significant standard (Crossley & McNamara, 2011). With very few researchers investigating this field, this study intends to explore Continuation Writing, a new rising teaching method, put forward by Wang Chuming, from the ESL teacher perspective can improve ESL learners’ writing coherence, targeting junior college students who are not English majors. Quantitative method will be conducted to evaluate the changes of language coherence when students equipped with the method “Continuation Writing”. The language analysis tool-Coh-metrix will be used to exam the language coherence levels of participants’ English writings closely from various aspects, such as referential cohesion, sentences overlap, logical cohesion and so on. This study may signify the urgent needs for ESL teaching on English writing and the improvement of language coherence will help ESL learners to improve their English writing ability to some extent.

Keywords

Continuation writing; Writing coherence; Non-english major students; Chinese junior colleges