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Pragmatics
Vol. 5:3 (1995) ► pp.299–324

Cohesion strategies and genre in expository prose: An analysis of the writing of children of ethnolinguistic cultural groups

In most societies the ability to write has become a significant criterion in judging one's "success or "failure" in becoming literate. This paper focuses on the classroom literacy practice called "writing," inasmuch as learning to write in a specific kind of way is part and parcel of children's literacy learning expectations. It is based on a study which examined cohesion patterns found in expository writing samples of sixth grade urban African American, urban Appalachian, and mainstream culture children attending a middle school in a large midwestern urban school system in the United States. This paper challenges the prevailing notion that ethnicity, social class and language variation influence the quality of writing these children produce.

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 September 1995
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.5.3.02aba
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