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

Abstract

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.