Abstract:

For readers to successfully comprehend a text, they must be able to establish a coherent representation of its meaning and the construction of such coherent text representation assumes the existence of an ability to recognize coherence relations that bind discourse units together. These relations can be implicit or relatively explicit, marked by a variety of linguistic devices such as logical connectives and signaling phrases. The present study aims to find out to what extent L2 readers are able to benefit from such coherence relations: Are discourse or coherence relations salient or accessible enough for readers to facilitate comprehension? Do the readers recognize implicitly signaled or un-signaled relations during the process of online comprehension? Can the readers transfer their knowledge of local coherence to global coherence at the macro level of discourse? Through a mixed method research design, both quantitative and qualitative data were obtained through reading comprehension and discourse coherence tasks administered to 26 EFL freshman students enrolled at an English teacher education program. The relevant examples from a single test are discussed in relation to the recognition of coherence relations in text both at the local and global level. Thus, the difficulties students encounter in making sense of the text by the use of coherence relations are analyzed. The results suggest that coherence relations, in the absence of explicit marking, are not easily accessible to L2 readers. Particularly, the less skilled L2 readers experience problems in recognizing un-signaled relations unless they are aided by background knowledge, or previous content schemata. It seems that it is rather difficult to transfer knowledge of coherence relations at the local level to larger discourse level involving the whole text.

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