Profiling text cohesion in the development of L2 Chinese reading materials: variation by text level and genre

Developing reading materials tailored to the specific needs and proficiency levels of students is important yet challenging for educators and teachers. Current data-driven indices assisting this task primarily focus on lexical and syntactic text features, often overlooking text cohesion, a key discourse feature impacting reading comprehension. To fill this gap, this study explored the variation of text cohesion in second language (L2) Chinese reading materials across different text levels and genres. We used an NLP-based tool to examine the lexical, grammatical, and topical cohesion features of 450 representative L2 Chinese reading texts. A two-way MANOVA was then conducted to analyze the variation of text cohesion across different text levels and genres, as well as the interaction between text levels and genres. Our findings have revealed significant disparities in text cohesion across varying text levels, particularly in lexical cohesion features, and among different genres, with narratives standing out from argumentative and expository texts. Interaction effects between text level and genre were noted, albeit with small effect sizes. This study highlights the importance of text cohesion when developing reading materials for L2 Chinese learners and offers insights into developing text cohesion benchmarks for preparing reading materials of different levels and genres.