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Local Coherence And Its Limits: A Second Look At Second Sentences, Desmond Allison, Susheela Varghese, Siew Mei Wu
Local Coherence And Its Limits: A Second Look At Second Sentences, Desmond Allison, Susheela Varghese, Siew Mei Wu
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Our article takes up Joy Reid's (1996) proposal that second sentences deserve a second look in academic writing research and pedagogy. Reid's data and commentaries indicate that second sentences, the sentences following topic sentences, make important but generally underrated contributions to the (in)coherence of students' written paragraphs. Her study, in a U.S. university, found that English as a second language (ESL) student writers often developed paragraphs that did not meet the expectations of experienced native English speaker (NES) readers. We offer a contextualized critique and partial replication of Reid's exploratory study. Our research, in Singapore, investigates second sentence writing by …