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

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 com...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Reading in a foreign language 2016-04, Vol.28 (1), p.79
Main Authors: Plakans, Lia, Bilki, Zeynep
Format: Article
Language:English
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
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1539-0578
1539-0578