Abstract

The study focused on 5th grade, 9th grade and 12th grade students' ability to produce coherent expository texts and to use the linguistic resources with which local coherence is achieved in expository writing. Participants belonged to two public schools in Santiago, Chile, and their expository writing was elicited with writing prompts. Products of writing were coded using two different rubrics: Local Coherence (LC) and Local Coherence Resources (LCR). Results reveal a significant improvement for the measure LCR across age groups, but not for LC.