Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the topical structure of students' expository essays and what is judged as their "quality." From seventy-three essays which have been rated holistically by two readers on a six-point scale, eight essays of the lower score--"2" and eight essays of the higher score--"5" were used as the main data. The two groups of essays were compared with respect to several text features--length, syntax, and topical structure. The topical structure variables were shown to be highly useful in distinguishing between the two groups of texts. Particularly significant were mean number of T-units per topic; the mean number of T-units per parallel, extended parallel, and sequential progressions; the percentages of three types of progression, and the percentages of Type 3 and Type 5 sentences. The importance of these findings is discussed, and their implications for teaching and research are suggested.

Keywords: T-units, parallel progressions, extended parallel progressions, sequential progression, topical depth, topical structure.