Text coherence and pragmatic failure

EFL university students in the context of studies in English Philology often reach an adequate standard in speaking and writing informal English. However, they have difficulty mastering some of the formal genres they are required to produce such as academic essays. Students often seem to have got most things right in their essays or other writing tasks but teachers are still left with the feeling that something is amiss. After analysing students' texts, the conclusion that many teachers come to is that the fault lies somewhere above the level of the sentence but that is difficult to pinpoint with exactitude. The questio is then, what factors contribute to the 'foreignness' of students' written production