COHERENCE ERRORS IN LEARNERS' ESSAYS AND A POSSIBILITY OF THEIR IMPROVEMENT THROUGH EVALD (AUTOMATED EVALUATOR OF DISCOURSE)

In the paper, we present research of most common errors in coherence occurring in learners' essays. We carry out corpus-based research of essays written by learners (non-native speakers) of Czech focussing especially on errors concerning discourse connectives: on their use in a relevant context, on most common semantic confusions, on the use of connectives in a right position in a sentence etc. We examine whether there are some shared issues or tendencies concerning coherence errors that could be generalized and formulated as recommendations to students, e.g. which aspects they should pay attention to when writing a well-structured essay. In the next step, we introduce how learners of Czech may improve their writing skills using an online tool EVALD (Evaluator of Discourse). EVALD provides an automated essay scoring and gives also feedback to the users - it points out the strong and weak aspects of the text in various language layers including text coherence and discourse connectives. EVALD is a suitable tool for e-learning which can be used not only by students (language learners) but also by teachers as an assistant tool in their classes.