IN ASSESSING SECOND LANGUAGE (L2) WRITING, COHESION, AS THE PRIMARY MEANS OF REACHING DISCOURSE COHERENCE, HAS BEEN ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF TEXT LINGUISTICS. THIS STUDY PRESENTS A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TEXT COHESION DEVICES MEASURED IN ACADEMIC TEXTS WRITTEN BY STUDENTS WHO WERE NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISHEMPLOYING A NEW COMPUTATIONAL TOOL; NAMELY, COH-METRIX. IN SO DOING, 177 TEXTS INCLUDING 94TEXTS WRITTEN BY ENGLISH NATIVE SPEAKERS AND 83 TEXTS COMPOSED BY IRANIAN WRITERS WERE EXTRACTED FROM CHAPTER 5 OF THEIR DISSERTATIONS AT PH. D LEVELS. SUBSEQUENTLY, AMONG ALL INDICES MANIFESTING TEXT COHESION, SIX LINGUISTIC INDICES WERE SELECTED AND ANALYZED QUANTITATIVELY. THE RESULTS INDICATED THAT THERE WAS A STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO CORPORA IN TERMS OF TEXT COHESION. MOREOVER, THE RESULTS DEMONSTRATED A SIGNIFICANT LINK BETWEEN LATENT SEMANTIC ANALYSIS (LSA) METRICS AND COHESION IN ACADEMIC WRITINGS IN A WAY THAT L2 WRITERS FORMED SENTENCES WHICH WERE CONCEPTUALLY MORE SIMILAR TO THE CONSECUTIVE, ADJACENT SENTENCES IN THE TEXTS THAN L1 WRITERS. LIKEWISE, THE SENTENCES PRODUCED BY L2 WRITERS OF ENGLISH CONVEYED MORE GIVENNESS COMPARED TO THOSE COMPOSED BY NATIVE ENGLISH WRITERS.