Abstract:

In higher education, writing plays an important role in students' learning. Students take college notes, participate in written exams and are assessed based on papers they hand in. However, university students often experience difficulties in writing and revising despite their secondary school training. Because of the increasing length and complexity of texts, text coherence gains importance at this level.This experimental intervention study explores how an explicit revision instruction can change students' use of transitional phrases as a means of creating text coherence. In addition, by means of survey data, it offers an insight in the students’ revision task conceptualization. The results of a two-way mixed ANOVA show a significant main effect of measurement occasion. Nevertheless, despite the significant difference in the use of transitional phrases for the different measurement occasions, there was no significant difference found between the control and the instruction group. The increase in the use of transitional phrases could therefore not be linked to the intervention study, but could be explained by the concepts of practice effect and task effect.The survey on revision task conceptualization shows that all students focus highly on spelling.

Keywords:

Text Coherence, Transitional Phrases, Tertiary Education, Revision Task Conceptualization, Spelling.