This paper analyzes academic essays written by Japanese university students. One of their weak points lies on a lack of coherence in their writings. In order to investigate the characteristics of their writings in English, I conducted a micro-level analysis based on a student\u27s essay and a macro-level analysis by using learner corpus consisting of 21 students\u27 essays. The findings show that Japanese students have difficulty with using cohesive devices such as reference and conjunction
