ABSTRACT
Students' poor performance in English language at Senior Secondary School level is a thing of concern to all. Several efforts have been made to solve this recurring problem but to no avail. This study, as one of such efforts, was conducted using Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis to Bridge Inter-Language Gaps of the Narrative Essays of Final Year Students. It was to find out whether Systemic Functional Linguistic approach could be used to analyse SSS students' narrative essays, detect inter-language gaps and use the same approach to bridge the identified gaps. Senior Secondary School students, from Government Senior Secondary School, Aminu, and Therbow Secondary Schoo,l Zaria were used for the study. Two essay questions (one pre test, one post test) were given to these students. Teaching was done in-between these tests to bridge identified gaps from the first test. The essence of the post test was to compare the result of the first test with the second after the treatment and to determine whether the treatment was able to solve the problems. Three research questions raised were answered and three null hypotheses formulated were tested. The outcome of the study revealed that Systemic Functional Linguistic technique had a significant effect on grammatical, organizational as well as coherent and cohesive inter-language variations of final year Senior Secondary School students' narrative essays. The implications of the findings for students, teachers, and Systemic Functional Linguistic study were given. It was suggested that further investigation be conducted on any other area not covered by this study. Some of these are: use of SFL to teach argumentative, descriptive, expository and procedural essays; developing a systemic functional based English Language teaching Curriculum/syllabus and the effect of SFL on comprehension and summary. The study concluded with the findings that there is need for teachers to apply SFL techniques to analyses of students' essays in formal contexts and use the outcome to teach them.