The third component of L2 narrative competence is mastery of linguistic cohesion. To construct competent and coherent narratives it is not sufficient to follow a context-appropriate narrative structure and to provide sufficient evaluation – coherence also relies on cohesion, or surface links between clauses and sentences. Two types of resources are used to create cohesion. Lexical resources include lexical ties (e.g., reiteration, collocation, synonymy) and deictic markers, which include personal deixis (e.g., pronouns), temporal deixis (e.g., temporal adverbs), spatial deixis (e.g., demonstratives, verbs of motion), social deixis (e.g., forms of address, kinship terms), and discursive deixis (e.g., context-dependent references, such as 'next chapter'). Grammatical resources include reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, and tense and aspect.

Our analysis of American learners’ narratives shows systematic weaknesses in the area of cohesion, and more specifically in patterns of character introduction, reference continuation, temporality, and connectivity. Weaker storytellers, for instance, introduce the main characters with personal pronouns, e.g., "Сначала мы видим, как она переходит через мост", "Но он хочет выезжать", instead of nouns such as девочка, девушка, женщина, мужчина, or personal names such as Мистер Бин. Weaker narratives also lack temporal and logical connectors (click here for a list of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx).

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