scholarly journals THE ROLE OF GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN THE TEXT QUALITY AMONG JORDANIAN EFL STUDENTS IN EXPOSITORY ESSAYS

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (42) ◽  
pp. 299-306
Author(s):  
Khaled Salem Ahmad Amayreh ◽  
Ahmad Taufik Hidayah Abdullah
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
Text Quality ◽  
Cohesive Devices ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Written Compositions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Expository Essays

The present paper shares interest that many scholars and linguists have highlighted in investigating the relationship between writing quality and grammatical cohesion devices. The aim of this study is to find out the relationship between the use of grammatical cohesive devices on the overall quality of expository essays produced by EFL fourth-year undergraduate students majoring in the English language at the Department of English language and literature Hashemite University in Jordan. It seeks to determine the efficacy of academic writing by Jordanian EFL students. Thirty purposive samples of compositions were collected and analyzed by the researcher to measure the relationship between the score of the writing quality and the grammatical cohesion devices in students' writing based on (1) analytical scale Jacob et al., (1981), and (2) Halliday and Hasan (1976) taxonomy of grammatical cohesion. The results showed that grammatical cohesive devices did not constitute a statistically significant correlation with the score of writing quality. It also revealed that the EFL students' written compositions were not successful due to their incapability to utilize the different forms of grammatical cohesive devices and their lack of knowledge about effectively using these devices in their academic writing.

scholarly journals The Effect of Using Conjunction as Cohesive Device on the Undergraduates’ Quality of Writing in Argumentative Essays of Jordanian EFL Learners

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rawhi Yousef Salman Al Shamalat ◽  
Che An Binti Abdul Ghani
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
English Language ◽  
Mixed Method Research ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Cohesive Devices ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Argumentative Essays ◽  
Mu'tah University

The goal of this research was to investigate the effect of use conjunctions on the overall quality of argumentative writing of Jordanian English as foreign language (EFL) learners. This mixed-method research included sixty (n=60) undergraduate students at the Department. of English Language and Literature at Mu’tah University in Jordan. The participants of the research were selected using purposive sampling method. The data of the research were collected using written essays and interviews. The data was analyzed using SPSS. The data was collected using analytical scale Jacob et al., (1981) to measure the quality of argumentative essays. The result of this research showed that there was a weak negative but irrelevant correlation between writing quality and the frequency of conjunctions as cohesive devices. This correlation indicates that the frequent and general use of devices in the writing of Jordanian students did not contribute to the quality of the writing under any conditions. Also the finding revealed that there is an extremely negative but irrelevant correlation between the use of conjunctions devices by Jordanian EFL students and their writing quality. Therefore, the correlation was negative and insignificant for Jordanian EFL students. More specifically, the result shows that the frequencies of conjunctions were not found as an indicator of good writing quality for Jordanian EFL students. This research is significant for providing a considerable number of pedagogical implications for further research that will offer great contribution to the field of teaching writing in EFL setting in Jordan in particular and English as second language (ESL) context in general. Moreover, the research has shown a better understanding of cohesive devices / conjunctions by Jordanian EFL students at Mu’tah University.

scholarly journals ERROR ANALYSIS OF CONJUNCTION IN EXPOSITORY ESSAY WRITING BY JORDANIAN UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS STUDYING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (EFL)

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (42) ◽  
pp. 482-491
Author(s):  
Khaled Salem Ahmad Amayreh ◽  
Ahmad Taufik Hidayah Abdullah
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Learners ◽  
English Language ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Cohesive Devices ◽  
Semantic Resources ◽  
Expository Essays

Academic writing is used a lot in the academic field and general writing as a distinct genre discourse in the linguistic and socio-cultural fields. Good writers generally use well-formed sentences; they often establish connections between sentences. Writing an essay is still a critical problem for most EFL undergraduate students since they are still not able to establish connections between sentences. The purpose of this study is to investigate the usage of conjunctions as cohesive devices in expository essays produced by EFL fourth-year undergraduate students majoring in the English language at the Department of English language and literature, Hashemite University in Jordan. A corpus of 30 expository essays was collected by using a simple purposive sampling technique to answer the questions of the study based on the theory of cohesion analysis by refining the grammatical cohesive related aspect based on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) taxonomy of conjunction. The results of this study confirm earlier studies showing English learners as a foreign language are having difficulty in using conjunctions in their writing. This study contributes to the written discourse and pedagogy within the field of teaching English for academic writing. The study recommends that grammatical cohesive devices and their function should be explained to the students through explicit teaching, not as separated grammatical items but as discourse semantic resources of text creation.

scholarly journals A Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis of Cohesion and The Writing Quality of Saudi Female EFL Undergraduate Students

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khawater Fahad Alshalan
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Writing Assessment ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
Lexical Cohesion ◽  
Cohesive Devices ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistic ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Qualitative Data Analysis Software ◽  
Writing Scores

This study aims to investigate how frequently Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) cohesive devices were used as well as their relationship with the writing quality of 100 Saudi EFL undergraduate students in Al Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It uses a mixed method approach, where the students’ essays were analyzed using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in terms of the textual meta-function of cohesive devices. The five types of the cohesive devices are the following: lexical cohesion, reference, conjunction, substitutions, and ellipses. Moreover, each of their subcategories were analyzed in the students’ texts. The NVivo qualitative data analysis software and the corpus analysis (conducted using AntConc) were used to calculate the frequencies of each cohesive device found in the data. The IELTS writing assessment scale was also used to evaluate the students’ writing scores. The results show that the most frequently used device was lexical cohesion, specifically repetition. Saudi EFL undergraduate students tended to repeatedly stay focused on the central idea of the topic. Furthermore, Pearson’s correlation coefficient found a relationship between the students’ writing scores and length of their essays, the use of cohesive ties and the scores, and cohesive ties and the length of the students’ essays. This study recommends that EFL teachers provide Saudi EFL students several cohesive tools in order to help them improve their writing skills and connect their ideas smoothly.

scholarly journals Cohesive Devices and Academic Writing Quality of Thai Undergraduate Students

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natthapong Chanyoo
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Assessment ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
Cohesive Devices ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Writing Scores ◽  
Junior Students

The current study aims to investigate (1) common cohesive devices used in the writing development of Thai undergraduate students majoring in English, (2) the frequency of cohesive devices used in the writing of Thai undergraduate students majoring in English, and (3) the relationship between the number and types of cohesive devices and the quality of the writing as rated by writing experts. Thirty junior students majoring in English contributed thirty academic essays as sample texts in the study, with a total number of 16,856 words. Halliday & Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of cohesion was used as an analytical framework of cohesive devices, while a writing assessment rubric developed by Hogue & Oshima (2007) was used to determine students’ writing quality. His findings revealed four types of cohesive devices frequently used by Thai undergraduate students including reiteration, reference, conjunction, and ellipsis. A one-way ANOVA revealed significant difference numbers of cohesive devices used in the students’ writing. In addition, students’ writing scores positively correlated with the total number of words used in the writing task, the total number of cohesive devices used, and the number of references.

scholarly journals STRATEGIES IN DEVELOPING ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN ACADEMIC WRITING BY EFL STUDENTS

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Teguh Budiharso
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Study Data ◽  
Writing Strategies ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Bahasa Indonesia

This study was aimed at seeing the writing strategies used by EFL Undergraduate students at Muhammadiyah University of Malang. This study used content analysis as the design, focusing on the quality of rhetoric and strategies in developing English academic essays written in Bahasa Indonesia and in English Language.  The study assigned 10 students as the subject of the study. Data of this study included English and Indonesian essays, answers of  questionnaires and responses of interview given to the 10 students.  The study revealed that good writers wrote linear essays in Bahasa Indonesia and in English language.  In writing practices and strategies, poor writers did not write draft of the essays, did not revise, and did not edit the essays, either. Good writers, on the contrary did make drafting, revising, and editing before final copy of an essay was achieved. In addition, reading references were also influential for the good writers to improve writing style and quality of the content of the essays, but not for the poor ones.

Productive Vocabulary Knowledge of ESL Learners

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulmalik Usman ◽  
Dahiru Musa Abdullahi
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
English Language ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
Lexical Frequency ◽  
Frequency Profile ◽  
Esl Learners ◽  
The Relationship

The paper seeks to investigate the level of productive knowledge of ESL learners, the writing quality and the relationship between the vocabulary knowledge and the writing quality. 150 final year students of English language in a university in Nigeria were randomly selected as respondents. The respondents were asked to write an essay of 300 words within one hour. The essays were typed into Vocab Profiler of Cobb (2002) and analyzed the Lexical Frequency Profile of the respondents. The essays were also assessed by independent examiners using a standard rubric. The findings reveal that the level of productive vocabulary knowledge of the respondents is limited. The writing quality of the majority of the respondent is fair and there is a significant correlation between vocabulary and the witting quality of the subjects. The researchers posit that productive vocabulary is the predictor of writing quality and recommend various techniques through which teaching and learning of vocabulary can be improved.

scholarly journals The Relationship between Morphological Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge of Thai EFL Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Sarunya Tarat
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Morphological Awareness ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Identification Test ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Unknown Words ◽  
The Relationship

This study focuses on the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge of English among Thai EFL university students. All participants are taking English language as their major field in the universities situated at the lower northern region of Thailand. The morphological awareness identification test was employed to identify the linkage between morphological awareness and vocabulary gain Thai EFL learners. The test was divided into 2 parts: self-checking and morpheme identification. Fifty English vocabularies in intermediate and upper-intermediate level were used in the test in which the participants were requested to check whether they have seen the vocabularies in the test and also asked to break those vocabularies into morphemic units. The results showed that the participants possessed an adequate level of morphological awareness to break words into morphemes correctly even though they were unknown words of the participants. Additionally, the findings also revealed that there is no significant difference between male and female in acquiring morphological awareness of English and gaining English vocabularies.

scholarly journals The Role of NLP Principles as Tools for Facilitating Learning EFL For Saudi Students

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed A. Abuzaifah
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
English Language ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Saudi Students ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Sensory Acuity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Learning English

Learning English language for the majority of Saudi students has always been considered difficult and rarely successfully achieved. “English poses difficulties for many Saudi students due to the low English levels acquired at secondary schools” (Al-Shami, 2004). Additionally, the overall achievement in English language among the majority of Saudi students, after completing six years of studying EFL extensively, is remarkably low (AL-Karood, 2006; Al Buna’yan, 2003; Al Guaid, 1997; Abuammah, 2002). This research paper will investigate, discuss and analyse the NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) concepts; change and modelling, as well as NLP four principles; outcomes, rapport, sensory acuity and flexibility, in order to specify the actual extent to which these concepts and principles can assist the Saudi EFL students to achieve better, easier and faster performance in learning the English language. By the end of this paper, the researcher intends to highlight the relationship between the NLP principles and the SLA learning strategies (O’Malley, 1990), as well as to attempt to describe some possible ways for applying the NLP principles into SLA.

scholarly journals PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ SELF-REGULATED LEARNING STRATEGY, MOTIVATION, AND REVISION BEHAVIORS IN EFL ACADEMIC WRITING

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Salim Nabhan
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Learning Strategy ◽  
Language Education ◽  
English Language Education ◽  
Self Regulated Learning ◽  
Regulated Learning ◽  
Writing Revision ◽  
Personal Process ◽  
The Relationship

<p>The present study explored pre-service teachers’ self-regulated learning strategy<br />and motivation in EFL academic writing. A further aim of the study is to<br />investigate the relationship between their self-regulated learning strategy and<br />motivation as well as to explore the revision behaviors in English academic<br />writing. A questionnaire was administered to 56 pre-service teachers (PST)<br />majoring English language education. The questionnaire covered 16 items of<br />questions regarding self-regulated learning strategy comprising environmental<br />process, behavioral process, and personal process, as well as motivation. PSTs’<br />revisions of academic writing were also assessed using writing revision categories<br />to identify their revision behaviors. Descriptive analyses indicated that<br />participants were moderate to high in their self-regulated learning strategy and<br />motivation toward their writing activities. Furthermore, the result showed that<br />despite the fact that self-regulated learning strategy in the aspect of environmental<br />strategy and personal strategy did not significantly correlate with motivation,<br />behavioral strategy significantly correlated with motivation. In addition to this,<br />among the revision categories, the aspects of organization, citation, mechanics,<br />language use, and references were the most common categories of revisions,<br />while content and format were the least ones. The study might have implication<br />on the PST’s EFL academic writing instruction.<br />Keywords: self-regulated learning strategy, motivation, revision, EFL academic<br />writing</p>

scholarly journals A Discourse Analysis: Cohesion of the Introduction Section of Research Article

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Anis Firdatul Rochma ◽  
Sulis Triyono
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Language Teaching ◽  
Research Articles ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Lexical Cohesion ◽  
Research Article ◽  
English Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Competence

<em>As an effort to give contribution to the existing knowledge, it is expected for the undergraduate students to compose an engaging research article in order to convince the readers about the importance of the research article. However, there is only a little attention given to the articles written by the undergraduate students although it is considered very critical to examine whether the exposure of English academic writing has significantly enhances the writing competence of the students. Furthermore, as it is also very crucial to build a meaningful semantic meaning among the sentences in order to disclose the worthiness of the research article, it is essential to analyze the cohesion of the research article written by the undergraduate students. Henceforth, the present research is projected to investigate the cohesion of the research articles written by the undergraduate students of English Language Teaching. As the introduction section of research article is likely to be an area to portray the logical explanation of the research, the present research solely focuses on examining the cohesion of the introduction section of research article. By adopting a qualitative design and involving several steps to analyze the introduction section, it is revealed that the grammatical cohesion is considered to be the most utilized type of cohesion in writing the introduction section. Still, the lexical cohesion is also necessary to build an eloquent semantic meaning about the topic as well the importance of the research article.</em>

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