ABSTRACT
Students
are faced with the challenge of using English language to communicate
effectively in writing. Essay writing is an important part of their
academic activities, which they have to engage in to answer test and
assignment questions. The researcher observed over the years of teaching
Higher Diploma Students of Kaduna Polytechnic, that students have a
problem with being able to write coherent and meaningful essays. Many
things could be responsible for such a problem but the researcher chose
to examine the extent to which connectives affect the students' writing
of coherent and meaningful essays. The aim of this study on the Use of
Connectives in the Essays of Higher Diploma Students of Kaduna
Polytechnic was to carry out a textual analysis of the use of
connectives in the essays of this group of students. The objectives were
to identify the connectives that students use more frequently in their
essays as coordinating, correlating and subordinating devices in their
essays; to analyse the extent to which students are able to use
connectives to achieve texture in their essays; to highlight the
connectives that pose problems to students in their essays and to
compare the extent to which the writing of engineering, science and
business management students differ when they write essays on topics
outside their areas of specialization. The data used for analysis was
drawn from students' essays. Students were given two essays (one
narrative and one argumentative) to write as an assignment. Sixty (60)
essays were selected for analysis from these essays (30 narrative and 30
argumentative). A paragraph and a sentence from that paragraph were
selected for analysis (clause type, Theme/Rheme, types of conjunctions
used (in the selected paragraph) and the frequency of the occurrence of
conjunctions in the entire essay). The study was set within the
framework of Systemic Functional Grammar, and it adopted the works of
Halliday and Mathiessen(2004) and Bloor and Bloor(2004) to provide the
model for the analysis of the essays. Systemic Functional Grammar was
adopted because it is a theory of grammar that is concerned with
language as a meaning making resource. The major finding of the research
is that students used the coordinating conjunction and more frequently
than any other connective and completely avoided using the correlating
conjunctions in their essays. Although content was not affected by this,
it is obvious that students' knowledge of the variety of conjunctions
available for use in writing essays is limited. The study recommends
that students learn to use a wider variety of conjunctions and punctuate
their writing appropriately in order to write coherent and meaningful
essays.