Syntactic factors impacting essay writing skills of learners of English as a second language

Abstract

Writing essays at the tertiary level has always presented challenges to students in Sri Lankan universities as it involves a multitude of linguistic competencies. It is identified through essay writing activities and assignments that the first-year students are weak and have limitations in showing the variety of sentence patterns and phrasal and clausal embeddedness and sophistication. The objective of the study is to investigate how syntactic factors impact the essay writing skills of first-year undergraduates following the degree program in the English medium at the Faculty of Applied Sciences of the University of Vavuniya. The sample size was 10% of the population, and their written texts consisted of 150-160 sentences. The semi-structured interview was conducted as a supplementary component and analysed qualitatively. The texts were selected based on their marks, and the collected data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. This result shows that most students' performance scores in< Subject+ Verb+ Complement>(SVC) sentence pattern usage are above 50%. Therefore, it proves that the students acquired SVC better than other patterns. Furthermore, the findings demonstrated that when students construct sentence patterns during essay writing in a constrained environment, the tendency to show structural variation, diversity of sentence types, and structural embeddedness are considerably low and grammatical errors in their written constructions are high. The study concludes that the syntactic factors, such as diversity of sentence types, variety of sentence patterns, syntactic structures, structural embeddedness, disinterest towards …