Losing and finding coherence in academic writing

universities typically attract a very diverse enrolment. Students are of different ages and cultural, linguistic and educational backgrounds. In the case presented here, there is a further complexity. Most students have a history of poor performance, even failure, in their subjects, clearly as a result of their poor command of the written language and in particular the great difficulties they have with the genres of academic writing. A single overwhelming challenge confronts the majority of these students: an inability to construct a coherent argument in response to a given question. An analysis of samples of students’ writing reveals two interesting results: that native and non-native English-speaking students were sometimes indistinguishable in their quality of writing, and both groups tended to suffer from a loss of coherence in argument. This paper probes the nature of noncoherence in these students’ writing, suggests reasons for it and proposes some remedies.