Topical Depth and Writing Quality in Student EFL Compositions

ABSTRACT This study tests a method to describe the relationship between coherence and writing quality by using topical structure analysis. Originally the method was used to examine short professional texts written in the mother tongue (L1) but in the present study it is applied to short compositions written in English by students learning this foreign language (EFL). The analyses showed that what characterized good writers was the ability to develop the topics in their compositions more evenly across several topic levels than mid‐quality writers and especially the poor writers. Good writers were more homogeneous (measured by the size of standard deviation) as a group in handling topics at h…