Cohesion Is Not Coherence

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to criticize the concept of cohesion as a measure of the coherence of a text. The paper begins with a brief overview of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion concept as an index of textual coherence. Next, the paper criticizes the concept of cohesion as a measure of textual coherence in the light of schema-theoretical views of text processing (e.g. reading) as an interactive process between the text and the reader. This criticism, which is drawn from both theoretical and empirical work in schema theory, attempts to show that text-analytic procedures such as Halliday and Hasan's cohesion concept, which encourage the belief that coherence is located in the text and can be defined as a configuration of textual features, and which fail to take the contributions of the text's reader into account, are incapable of accounting for textual coherence. The paper concludes with a caution to second language (EFL/ESL) teachers and researchers not to expect cohesion theory to be the solution to EFL/ESL reading/writing coherence problems at the level of the text.

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