Moroccan Students’ Writing Difficulties

Problems of Cohesion and Coherence. Kenitra as a Case Study

Abstract

This study aims at investigating and identifying cohesion and coherence problems that Moroccan 2nd-year baccalaureate students encounter in written discourse. An overall number of thirty students from two fields of study (Math Sciences and Economics) participated in the study, producing a total number of thirty essays. Students’ application of cohesion and coherence were studied and analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English (1976) and Oshima and Hogue’s (2006) criteria for achieving coherence. Regarding the analysis of the corpus, it was discovered that students tend to use more reference ties, followed by lexical ties and conjunctions. Substitution and ellipsis linkers were scarcely used. Besides, the results clarify that Math Sciences Students outweigh their Economics counterparts in using and dealing with cohesion devices. As for coherence, the findings show slight differences between the two groups of upper high school students in adhering to coherence techniques. Finally, the study reveals that students lack important training in using and varying cohesion and coherence linkers.