Chapter 1 the study of collocations

iv) Terminal-Units 
 
 
The essays were also analysed with respect to the number of terminal 
units (T-Units) they contained.  All the main clauses plus any subordinate 
clauses attached to or embedded in them were counted as T-Units (see Long 
1991, unpublished paper; Hunt 1966).  A T-Unit is a structural discourse unit 
and it was used in this study in three different measures: length of T-Units, 
Error-Free T-Units, and S-Nodes per T-Unit.  Inter-rater reliability for the 
number of T-Units was also obtained from two other raters on a randomly 
sampled sub-set of the data (5% of the data), and was at 97%.  Each of the raters 
was given the same sample of essays and the T-Unit instructions (see Appendix 
 
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K) and were asked to mark all the T-Units in each essay.  A short training 
session was given by the researcher on two other essays.  After the 
measurement, the number of T-Units marked by the raters and the researcher 
were compared and the inter-rater reliability (97%) was considered sufficient 
for the T-Units measurement.