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Studies on cohesion or coherence often focus on a certain level of text, or the distinction between them. It would be beneficial to investigate, from the perspective of the writing process, how overt surface links contribute to the interpretation and communicative purpose of a text. This paper explores cohesion and coherence at three levels of academic text - lexicon, sentence structure, and organization of information. Lexical cohesive analysis suggests that sentences which are functionally more important to the thematic development of a text usually contain more cohesive ties with other sentences than sentences less important functionally. At the sentence level, equally grammatical sentences could carry different communicative values in a given text. Furthermore, the given/new information patterns in paragraphs of various rhetorical functions are identified. With regard to the organization of information, students need to develop their pragmatic competence in a number of academic genres and information unit types.

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The potential of online language learning has received much attention recently. This paper reports the design of an online writing system featuring learning support for non-native students during their writing process. The central premise is that in the online writing situation, students are in great need of writing aids. The proposed system provides a friendly and supportive writing environment. It consists of three main parts: writing practice, peer review, and e portfolio. Writing practice contains not only writing guidelines to raise students' consciousness of the structure of the target genre but also learning resources and tools that render full assistance. The resources include online translators, online dictionaries, phraseology, and wordlists, while the tools include a web concordancer and a collocation builder. Peer review allows students to give feedback to their partner's online writing, leading hopefully to reflection and revision. E portfolio consists of a learning record and a learning journal. Students can check their individual online writing record and retrieve both original and revised drafts for comparison. Learning journal is the place where students reflect over their writing process and problems. Pedagogical implications are finally discussed.

To assist learners in obtaining professional abilities, meet social demand for talent, and achieve favorable educational outcomes, academic courses generally have unique syllabuses, learning goals, and teaching purposes according to their characteristics and specialized knowledge and skills. Furthermore, it could help the students of Industrial Design enhance the connection with employment after the graduation when they understand the characteristics of auxiliary devices and equipment before entering workplaces. Meanwhile, the students being cultivated the design capability could improve and innovate tools, as the improvement of auxiliary devices and the practical design of innovative products and the functions from a professional engineer are close to the users' demands.In this study, the Delphi method, a group decision-making technique, andthe analytic hierarchy process (AHP) multiattribute decision-making function was adopted to establish a decision-making model for designing multifunctional products for assessing the students of Industrial Design in learning effectiveness in innovative engineering product design and development. In addition, a practical multifunctional product-design case was investigated to demonstrate the application of the model. This study found that integrating interdisciplinary courses and instruction by industry professionals and introducing industry-academia cooperation had a considerable influence on interdisciplinary teaching and learning.