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.