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The present paper deals with the Slovak secondary school students' problem of using commas in the complex sentences containing adverbial and nominal subordinate clauses while writing essays in English. It also concentrates on the English teachers' ability to see correct/incorrect usage of commas in their students' works. The research sample is formed by school leaving exam essays written by the students whose English is at an B1 level. The digitalized texts of 115 essays are uploaded in The Main Corpus and divided into 8 different subcorpora referring to different essay's topics. Detailed corpus linguistic and statistical analyses lead to the conclusions that the overall commas use success of the observed EFL students directly depends on how difficult the topic of an essay is, and that the students' error rate in adverbial clauses is much higher than the rate in nominal clauses. The last finding referring to the fact that English language teachers overlook or incorrectly correct commas in a substantial number of sentences makes the authors think about all the possible roots and reasons of the students' inaccuracy in commas usage in their written performance and several suggestions how to solve this problem.

Conjunctive adverbials or simply conjuncts represent specific sentence elements contributing to the overall semantic coherence of a text. Their use or omission depends entirely on the decision of the author of the text, the way he or she perceives and intends to convey a particular type of connection between its individual parts. In the present linguistic study of the literary work—the self-selected novel “Jane Eyre”—we observe and subsequently specify and evaluate occurrence of conjunctive adverbials in the text with the focus on their particular semantic categories and positions within a sentence.

The sentence structure complexity and clause positioning (Staveley, 2013) represent the striking features of the writing style of the 19-th century British fiction writers. The present syntactic study brings detailed quantitative and qualitative syntactic analyses of peripheral sentence elements, sentence (stance) adverbials, occurring in the Victorian novel Jane Eyre (1847), and offers their classification into style and content disjuncts. As the latter ones are generally employed by fiction in the novels' dialogues and main characters' reflections (Biber, 1999), the research questions focus predominantly on their function and frequency of use. Content disjuncts help to express the possibility or the doubt of the utterance and explain the outcome of the actions and events happening in the story. The research outcomes have confirmed that content disjuncts considerably contribute to understanding the writing style of Charlotte Brontë. This phenomenon can be further studied and developed in the syntactic analyses of other remarkable 19th century novels and novelists. The research results will find their application not only in the theory and practice of syntax but also in the process of teaching/learning English as a foreign language.

Globalization affects all areas of life, the life of teachers including. The teaching profession is usually understood as a mission. The role of a teacher is to develop knowledge, abilities and skills of pupils and students and thus influence their values and opinions. Teachers present basic attributes of human lives' interconnections to their students. They teach them to take into account the interests and living conditions of all people -to think in a global way. The authors of the present paper try to explain how the globalization influences teachers in their process of education and knowledge transfer and answer the questions dealing with the principles effecting the global education of both students and their teachers. They also point out that the work of teachers is not only very demanding but also significantly influencing the quality of the knowledge level of every society.