Analyse of the narrative writing of secondary students…

النوع : Thèse

The study reported in this thesis examines the discourse, linguistic and rhetorical, qualities in secondary EFL students’ narratives by asking samples, 3480, of secondary students in 63 different public high schools in different provinces: the Bekaa, Beirut, Tripoli, South Lebanon, and North Lebanon, to write about two narrative topics at two different times of two different school grades, Grade 10 and Grade 11. The study aims to analyze the subjects’ written products quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of four variables: syntactic maturity, error variables, cohesion with the suitable and balanced use of cohesive ties, and story grammar. The major findings of the study revealed that the students were novice writers because of displaying deficiencies. They frequently wrote quantitatively longer stories but they did not show a higher level of syntactic maturity. Their narrative essays were composed of kernel and coordinated, rather than subordinated or embedded, sentences. Their errors were of diverse kinds with varied weights of gravity. Their domain errors remained constant while they made fewer long-domain errors over time. The rhetorical qualities were not less lacking. The students under study had the tendency to employ cohesion for local rather than global connections. They underused, overused, or misused cohesive ties. In general, the students wrote complete stories in spite of the imprecise use of cohesion leading to low narrativity level. These stories were connected semantically more than linguistically. In a nutshell, their limited linguistic proficiency held back their production of more sophisticated stories. Therefore, they were below the threshold level. Earlier research on EFL writing goes in line with most findings. Finally, both theoretical and pedagogical implications are addressed in this study.