Vraag Naar Coherentie?

Recent research in discourse analysis shows that coherence plays an essential role in understanding discourse. It is, therefore, interesting to investigate what position coherence occupies in language teaching and testing. This question was addressed in two ways: a survey of literature written by language teachers and testers. The purpose of this survey was to find literature about coherence. It was found that such literature was very scarce. The second way was an analysis of final examinations in English for HAVO and VWO. In this analysis particular attention was given to questions pertaining to text coherence: it was found that only 12% of the examination questions were questions of coherence. So it can be concluded that coherence doesn't play an important part in language teaching and testing.Another question that was addressed in the article concerns the possibility of constructing a coherence test. To answer that question a test constructed at CITO (Dutch Institute for Educational Measurement),that was meant to test the understanding of coherence was examined in two ways. First a discourse analysis was made in order to find questions of coherence: 100% of the questions were questions of coherence. The second part of the research was empirical: 689 students were administered the discourse test. With these empirical data some hypotheses were formulated and tested.