Local coherence problem in written marartives of adult EFL learners: Topical of usage in various discourse contexts

ABSTRACT This study aims at investigating whether Turkish adult learners can use topical noun phrases (NP) coherently depending on the discourse context and information status. For this purpose, an empirical study was conducted among the first year learners who were enrolled to Anadolu University Education Faculty, English Language Teaching department. Firstly, the subjects watched a short silent movie by Charlie Chaplin, then they were asked to narrate the story of the film in English for the readers who did not watch the film. After the data were collected, four reader subjects, who are native speakers of English, were asked to read the narratives and underline the inappropriately used NPs at subject position. Data were analyzed depending on Reinhart's pragmatic aboutness theory. The statistical analysis af the data reveals that the subjects can manage to use topical NPs coherently in topic continuity context. However, they are not able to choose felicitious topical NPs in introducing a new topic and topic shifting contexts.