Cohesion features in ESL reading: Comparing beginning, intermediate and advanced textbooks

• Published in: Reading in a foreign language Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 79 - 100
• Main Authors: Plakans, Lia, Bilki, Zeynep
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Honolulu University of Hawaii, National Foreign Language Resource Center 01.04.2016; Reading in a Foreign Language
• Subjects: Cognitive Style; Cohesion; College Instruction; Content Analysis; Difficulty Level; Effect Size; English (Second Language); English as a second language; Flesch Kincaid Grade Level Formula; Flesch Reading Ease Score; Individualized Instruction; Language Acquisition; Language Proficiency; Language Skills; Language textbooks; Multivariate Analysis; Readability; Readability Formulas; Reading comprehension; Reading Instruction; Reading Materials; Reading Skills; Second Language Instruction; Second language learning; Statistical Analysis; Syntactic complexity; Teaching Methods; Textbook Content; Textbooks; Tukeys Test; United States > US
• ISSN: 1539-0578; 1539-0578

This study of English as a second language (ESL) reading textbooks investigates cohesion in reading passages from 27 textbooks. The guiding research questions were whether and how cohesion differs across textbooks written for beginning, intermediate, and advanced second language readers. Using a computational tool called Coh-Metrix, textual features were compared across the three levels using Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). The results indicated that some features of cohesion yielded significant variation, but with small effect sizes. The majority of cohesion features considered were not different across the textbook levels. Larger effect sizes were found with factors like length, readability and lexical or syntactic complexity.