Abstract

One of the most important characteristics of a text is coherence. Coherence can be briefly defined as the semantic and the logical integrity within a text. In this study, the texts written in a narrative style by 103 Turkish students and 98 migrant students (Uzbek) studying in the fifth grade of primary school have been compared in terms of text coherence. Findings of the study suggest that the success levels of both Turkish and migrant students in terms of text coherence are insufficient and there is no significant difference between the successes of these two groups and the problems related to the coherence show a similar distribution in each group. In this study, it has been found that the migrant schoolgirls are more successful than the migrant schoolboys although there are no such differences among Turkish students. The findings of the study also show that students regarded the act of writing as the disorderly arrangement of knowledge in the brain and putting it into a written form and they have extremely poor skills of thinking, deciding and planning which are required to compose a text.

Key words: Text coherence, writing skill, bilingualism, language education, primary school students.