Rhetorical Structure Theory and quality assessment of students’ texts

In this paper, I argue that the analysis of coherence structures of university students’ texts may contribute to text improvement. Furthermore, my results suggest a relationship between various coherence phenomena and the grades students earn for their papers. Based on the analysis of Austrian university students’ texts from three different business and economy-related study programs and interviews with instructors, I demonstrate that due to the often superficial grading practice of instructors, ‘disrupted text spans’ frequently remain unnoticed although they impair text quality. Regarding the relationship between texts’ grades and coherence phenomena, I show that relation-type differences between low and high graded papers seem to be discipline specific, whereas a general tendency exists that high graded papers display a more ‘symmetrical’ text structure and low graded papers have ‘asymmetrical’ structures.