Cohesion and Coherence in High School Students’ Written Work in Chuka Division, Kenya

Abstract

This paper reports the adherence to cohesion and coherence as an aspect of textuality in high school students’ written work. The study investigated the students’ written texts to establish the extent to which they conformed to cohesion and coherence as a requirement to be fulfilled for a written text to be considered as communicative. Coherence is a network of relations, which organizes and creates a text. This network is of surface relations, which link words and expressions to other words and expressions in a text. This aspect is achieved when many different factors are brought together to make every paragraph, sentence, and phrase give meaning to a text. Communication is paramount in any written text. For dissemination of information to take place, the meaning of the writer must be clear and complete. Coherence is a channel through which this objective can be achieved. Coherence in writing is much more difficult to sustain than coherent speech. This is because when one is writing, there is no room for paralinguistic features to enhance message clarity. Therefore, patterns of coherence should be explicit and carefully planned. Cohesion on the other hand refers to the ways in which texts and sentences are linked or connected by various linguistic and semantic ties. Use of cohesion in writing ensures that the elements in a sentence fit perfectly together to form a united and complete communication instance. It is a semantic concept that is achieved when the understanding of a section in the text is reliant on that of another. The study further examined the structure of the students’ written texts to find out whether they applied these two aspects as they indulged in writing exercises. Experimental research design was used. Thus there was an experimental and a control group. These two were subjected to pre-test and post-test. The experimental class was exposed to the aspects of cohesion and coherence and thereafter the two groups did a post-test. The data collected was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. It established the effects that the use of these two aspects had on the performance of the students in writing.