Digital Coherence: For Connectors Use in Online Communication and its Representation in Language Resources

Nowadays people write more than ever and digital communication is a driving force in this historical development. A large part of writing in everyday life is probably contained in written dialogues. Because of its importance for human communication, digital communication is also relevant in literacy teaching and its didactics, in particular in schools. A question which arises from the acceptance of digital communication as part of the curriculum is how teachers can evaluate the quality of digital communication. CMC can differ immensely from "traditional" academic text types (e.g. argumentative essays). For more "traditional" texts, norms of language use exist which are described in dictionaries and grammar books, but there is no such codified norm for digital communication which teachers can use as a reference and basis for evaluating texts. In this article, we analyse how connectors are used in digital communication and how particularities in the use of connectors in CMC are reflected in common German dictionaries and grammars. The results show that the CMC-specific use of connectors is rarely described in common dictionaries and grammars.