This paper discusses how a grammatical feature of the writers' first language (L1) may influence coherence in discourse organization of their second language (L2) writing. The study involves a qualitative contrastive analysis of 25 each of English essays written by L1 Japanese students and L2 English students with other L1 backgrounds. The Japanese language is a head-final language, and its noun modifiers are arranged in the order that a description of a head noun moves from the most general to the most specific. The present study hypothesizes that this grammatical feature of Japanese influences the way Japanese student writers organize their discourse in English because they are accustomed to start from the remotest idea and head towards the most specific idea.

Coherence of written discourse has long been discussed in the context of composition and rhetoric, and contrastive rhetoric is playing an important role in L2 writing research. Connor (1991) applied topical structure analysis, originally developed by Lautamatti (Lautamatti, 1987), as a measurement of evaluating coherence of written discourse. The study found that highly rated essays tended to have a high proportion of sequential progression and an extended parallel progression. Witte (1983), on the other hand, found that high quality essays had more parallel and extended parallel progression than low quality essays. One possible explanation of apparently discrepant findings reported in these studies is that coherence depends more on how closely a subsequent sentence is related to the preceding sentence and the main thesis/topic of the discourse whether progression is parallel or sequential.

The results of the analysis indicate that the introduction of the Japanese L2 English writers' essays consistently show a discourse pattern that progresses from general to specific ideas whereas the patterns of the essays written by other L2 English students show much greater variation. This study concludes that the progression pattern of written discourse found in the Japanese students' essays could negatively impact their scores because some of the remote background information used in developing the thesis may be considered irrelevant to the topic of discussion. It further discusses pedagogical implications as to how the awareness of differences in discourse organization patterns may be utilized for improving L2 student writing.