Abstract
In an attempt to establish the validity of Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) as an assessment tool in student academic writing, this study applies TSA in both high- and low-rated comparison-and-contrast essays. Following Simpson’s (2000) model, the study consists of two parts. The first part quantitatively describes the physical structure of freshman college students’ high- and low-quality comparison-and-contrast essays, and the second part presents how the topical development is carried out in the said essays. Results show that although there is a remarkable parallel preference of topical progressions between the two groups of data, over 60 percent of independent clauses in the low-quality writing introduce new topics compared to less than 50 percent in high-quality writing samples. Two-proportion z-test shows that the difference is significant, p=.012 <.05. Therefore, it may be inferred that low-quality writing tends to introduce more new topics in the independent clauses than in high-quality writing. Keywords: topical progressions; internal coherent structure; sentence elements; students’ essays; TSA DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2015-2101-10
Highlights
As early as 1978, Sommers was able to conclude that for native speakers of English, the novice writers focused merely on the lexical level of composition while disregarding the appropriateness of the utterance; whereas, experienced writers are able to include all linguistic levels to “shape the argument to fit the writer’s purpose”(p. 126)
Oshima and Hogue (2006, in Liangprayoon, Chaya, & Thep-ackraphong, 2013) argued that “when writers write expository essays, they develop their ideas in the essays by adding details and giving examples of the topics they discuss” (p. 66). It appears that there is no significant difference between the high- and low-composition comparison-and-contrast essays of the freshman college students in terms of topical structure
This may be attributed to the fact that in comparison-and-contrast essays, how topics are arranged in clausal sequence are highly predictable in the sense that both topic and clausal arrangement lend themselves to restrictions by the parameters of the fixed communicative goal of having to compare and contrast two entities, whether the subjects are comparison of gender traits, comparison of two cultures, or comparison of areas of study and so on
Summary
As early as 1978, Sommers (cited in Kroll 1990) was able to conclude that for native speakers of English, the novice writers focused merely on the lexical level of composition while disregarding the appropriateness of the utterance; whereas, experienced writers are able to include all linguistic levels to “shape the argument to fit the writer’s purpose”(p. 126). 2); they go on to identify the three levels of language which constitute that text, namely intrasentential structure, intersentential structure and discourse structure Considering these three levels, what becomes apparent is that as a writer moves into these distinct levels, the writer would eventually go beyond grammar and vocabulary into the business of linking linguistic elements to produce a unified, coherent whole composition at the discourse level. 127); early on, Connor and Farmer caution mentors about the need to guide ESL learners on the “situational and contextual causes of revision”. This implies that in a process-oriented approach, the linguistic component has to be contextualised with the socio-cultural and cognitive dimensions (Connor 1996)
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