The findings of the study showed that the overall mean score of the evaluation of coherence in the students' writings is above average, namely 62.07. A corpus of students' writings (30 scripts) was analyzed adapting an analytical coherence scale developed in the light of Bamberg's (1984) holistic coherence scale and approaches and studies that concern with text coherence in English. The study adopted a descriptive analytical approach. This paper aims at investigating the problems of coherence in the English writings of Saudi male and female students at Albaha University. On the other part, keeping repeating the same ideas, their failure to split their paragraphs in terms of content relevance, in addition to their inability to elaborate their ideas were the most problematic areas that prohibited them from producing coherent essay. The bad use of accurate conjunctions and transition words to link sentences and/or paragraphs together to convey relationships throughout the essay was also another problematic area. The most prominent problematic area students faced when writing cohesively was the very low ability to use synonymous words/phrases when needed. Cohesion and coherence were not highly established in the written essays. Findings showed that undergraduates' essays were not convenient and well-developed. A corpus of sixteen essays was analyzed using three rating scales, namely a holistic rating scale for the effectiveness of each essay, cohesion rating scale and coherence rating scale. The results have implications concerning the basis of teachers’ marks for coherence and the applicability of topic-based analysis as a method of assessing coherence of writing.The present study investigated cohesion and coherence in the writings of Saudi undergraduates majoring in English. Comparing these measures against the teachers’ scores, it was found that the number of moves between key concepts per 10 T-units correlated most closely with the teachers’ marks. Doing this allows several different measures of coherence to be generated. Topic-based analysis involves identifying key concepts in a text, identifying the relationships between these concepts, linking the relationships into a hierarchy, and mapping the text onto the hierarchy.
In this paper, topic-based analysis was chosen as a method of evaluating coherence and the results of this evaluation were compared with teachers’ marks for coherence. However, the reasonable probability of several readers reaching a consensus concerning the coherence of a text suggests that it may be possible to assign relatively reliable marks for coherence. The problems with marking coherence arise because it is by nature subjective.
Among the many possible aspects to assessing writing, one of the most problematic is coherence.
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