Conjunction in Expository Essay Writing by Jordanian Undergraduate Students Studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

Abstract

Academic writing is used a lot in the academic field and general writing as a distinct genre discourse in the linguistic and socio-cultural fields. Good writers generally use well-formed sentences; they often establish connections between sentences. Writing an essay is still a critical problem for most EFL undergraduate students since they are still not able to establish connections between sentences. The purpose of this study is to investigate the usage of conjunctions as cohesive devices in expository essays produced by EFL fourth-year undergraduate students majoring in the English language at the Department of English language and literature, Hashemite University in Jordan. A corpus of 30 expository essays were collected by using a simple purposive sampling technique to answer the questions of the study based on the theory of cohesion analysis by refining the grammatical cohesive related aspect based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of conjunction. The results show that additive conjunction covers the largest proportion of (57.70%) followed by causal conjunction (6.44%), adversative conjunction (3.64%), and temporal conjunction (3.64%). On the other hand, the analysis reveals that students use additive conjunction (17.93%), causal conjunction (5.32%), adversative conjunction (3.36%), and temporal conjunction (1.96%) inappropriately. This study contributes to the written discourse and pedagogy within the field of teaching English for academic writing. The study recommends that grammatical cohesive devices and their function should be explained to the students through explicit teaching, not as separated grammatical items but as discourse semantic resources of text creation.