A tool for teaching cohesion

Abstract

The paper introduces a two-tier writing support tool that helps students at school in writing more coherent essays. At one tier, students enter their essays and submit it for further process. At the other tier, the tutor receives the segmented format of their essays. The software prepares an environment to tutors for annotating students' essays in terms of a specific kind of annotation. Based-on the annotation the software produces a tree-shape graph representative of discourse structure of essays and sends it to the respective student. By observing many trees of this kind, we hope students understand the concept of discourse and write more coherent essays as a result. In the software, a novel Discourse Structure Builder Engine that has been recently proposed by researchers constructs the Discourse Tree based on a set of optimized discourse cue rules. In this paper it has been also shown why the software effectively reaches its aim, having looked at known theories in the concept of writing.