Comment On Coherence And Academic Writing: Some De

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In the academic paper “Coherence and Academic Writing: Some Definitions and Suggestions for Teaching,” the author Ann M. Johns provided an effective method for teachers to teach ESL students coherence systematically. According to the author’s method, she began her teaching that consisted of a minimum of three lessons, including “Deconstructing the Prompt and Preparing a Thesis,” “Examining a Thesis and the Relationships among Assertions in an Essay” and “Examining the Information Structure.” The three lessons, designed by Johns, were respectively set for different goals to instruct students step by step to improve the coherence in their essays. In the three lessons, the author intended to break the teaching of coherence into manageable, task-dependent parts, that is, teaching students from a more global to a more local consideration. By this way, students can have a deeper and a more concrete understanding of what to do to start and revise their essays to achieve the requirements of coherence. Through the entire process, unlike the traditional teaching that some teachers just giving their students comments on their assignments without any peer reviews, students can have the chance to evaluate others’ topics and develop their writing techniques such as examining the coherence of a topic in class discussion instead of totally relying on their teachers. Besides, by learning from the feedback and analysis of their writing from their peer, we may see that the three lessons increased students’ awareness of the role of coherence in writing and gave them new strategies for addressing it in their writing. What’s more, through several times of revision and discussion, students are able to improve their self awareness in dealing with incoherence problems. In conclusion, indeed, though coherence is difficult to learn, it need not be an abstract theory that is remote from

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