Use of Cohesive Features in ESL Students' E-mail and Word-Processed Texts: A Comparative Study

As the computer is rapidly finding its way into classrooms around the world at all levels of education, teachers are trying to find effective ways to integrate this technology into their curriculum. While the effectiveness of using word processing in the teaching of writing is acknowledged, there is still no general consensus on how to use, or even whether to use, asynchronous electronic mail, leaving a number of questions unanswered. For example, when given comparable academic tasks, do students produce similar texts in the two media or do they write differently according to the medium used? In order to determine whether the medium has an effect on the language that the students produce, a discourse analysis of comparable word-processed and e-mail writing assignments was carried out, focusing on twelve cohesive features and on text length. The students involved in the study were enrolled in a higher-intermediate English as a Foreign Language course at a university in the United States. The results indicate that two of the cohesive features, as well as text length, differentiated e-mail and word-processed writing. It was also found that, while they tended to write shorter texts in both media, Arab students tended to use more of some of the cohesive features than Asian students.