Coherence in L2 Written Discourse

The project

This project validates Dr Skoufaki’s approach to coherence error identification and uncovered teachers' definitions of ‘coherence’ and ‘coherence error’ as well as approaches to providing feedback and marking EFL writing for coherence. EFL teachers located coherence errors in the texts that she had already analysed in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and explained what ‘coherence’ meant to them. 

The teachers’ coherence marks and coherence measures calculated based on their annotations were compared with coherence measures calculated based on the output of the independent RST analysis of the same paragraphs. One such coherence measure was coherence break density. Coherence break density of teacher- and RST-identified breaks were correlated significantly and positively for one third of the teachers. Off-topic content and inductive content order were identified as coherence breaks by both the RST analysis and some teachers.

The findings

These findings suggest that language teachers differ in how they define coherence errors and that Rhetorical Structure Theory, an approach which focuses on only one aspect of coherence, cannot predict all the coherence errors identified by EFL teachers.