Syntactic Structural Analysis of Student Writing and Language Education

Abstract

This study investigates the diversity and syntactic complexity of sentence patterns in the essay writing of first-year English as a Second Language (ESL) undergraduates at the University of Vavuniya, Sri Lanka. Although university students are expected to demonstrate greater structural variety and complexity in academic writing, many learners continue to rely on limited sentence patterns and simple sentence constructions. The study therefore examines the extent to which first-year students demonstrate diversity and complexity at the intra-sentence level in their essay writing. A qualitative descriptive research design was adopted, supported by quantitative analysis. Ten essays written by first-year Information Technology students attached to the Faculty of Applied Science were selected through convenience sampling, comprising approximately 150 sentences. The corpus was analysed quantitatively and qualitatively using content analysis, thematic analysis, and descriptive statistics. The findings reveal that the Subject–Verb–Complement (SVC) pattern was the most frequently used sentence pattern, accounting for 56% of the analysed structures, followed by SVA (17%), SVO (15%), SVOC (8%), and SVOA (4%). In terms of sentence types, simple sentences constituted 76%, while compound and complex sentences accounted for 18% and 6%, respectively. These findings indicate that the students demonstrate limited syntactic diversity and complexity in academic essay writing. The qualitative analysis further shows that students experience difficulty in generating structurally complex phrases and clauses within sentences. The study concludes that explicit and progressive instruction in sentence patterns, phrasal structures, and clausal structures is necessary to improve syntactic variety, sentence sophistication, and overall academic writing quality among university ESL learners.