Students’ Difficulties with Cohesion and Coherence in EFL Essay Writing: A Case Study of Third-Year Civilization and Literature Students at Tlemcen University

Abstract

Since the publication of cohesion in English in 1976 by Halliday and Hasan, textual cohesion and coherence have been important notions in text analysis, and have aroused great interest of different scholars all over the world. But unfortunately, its application in Algeria is by far not satisfactory, especially in EFL writing. Students writing in an EFL classroom context should show their awareness of their own communicative goals, of the reader, and of the writing context, through producing acceptable academic essays where sentences and ideas must be connected one to another using cohesive devices, and coherence to create unity of the text context. But writing cohesively and coherently is a major challenge, specially at the essay level for many EFL students at Tlemcen University. For this purpose, a general research question in addition to three sub-questions are asked to reach the objectives of this study: -Do our EFL students have difficulties with cohesion and coherence in essay writing?