Incorporation of Discourse Coherence Strategies into Writing Skills Instruction

Discourse, as an object being studied nowadays in many disciplines of humanities and social sciences, plays a special role in applied linguistics, in both theory and practice. It is characterized mainly by cohesion and coherence; the former is created by some cohesive devices while the latter is established using certain strategies rarely incorporated into and investigated in language skills development. Therefore, this study is concerned with investigating the effect of discourse coherence strategies incorporated into writing instruction on developing writing skills. To this end, 50 Iranian female EFL learners assigned in 5 groups (4 experimental, 1 control) were exposed to four coherence-based strategies, including 1) Given/New Strategy (GNS), 2) Direct Matching Strategy (DMS), 3) Bridging Strategy (BRS), 4) Reinstating Old Information Strategy (ROIS), 5) Control group conventional instructions of writing skills, respectively.  Results of the One-Way ANOVA statistical analysis revealed that using discourse coherence-based strategies in the classroom, compared to mainstream instruction, can more significantly enhance the writing ability of EFL learners. Comparatively, the Give and New strategy-based instruction proved to be most effective in developing the target skill. However, cross-strategically, no significant difference was seen among the investigated discourse coherence-based strategies. The findings offer pedagogical implications for L2 practitioners, teachers, materials developers, and autonomy-seeking learners. They also provide further research insights into teaching writing besides all other language skills.