3.3.1 Narrativity
In Table 3, the results were chosen to give the overall view of the typical z-scores for each writing component in the present study. Highly narrative texts are typically easier to read (Allen, Likens & McNamara, 2018).
For the narrativity, approximately 75% of the z-scores were at the mean (0.0) or less than -0.5 meaning that the students conveyed their story telling in a more complicated way and rather difficult to read on both the task 1 and 2. The results of the z-score report also reflects the degree to which a story is being told, using characters, places, events, and other things familiar to readers. The example paragraphs below show the different characteristics of the texts through the uses of verbs, intentional actions, and the frequent pronouns that the writers used to convey the messages to their readers. For example:
(1) I use YouTube to listen to music, watch movies, and something which makes me fun. Accordingly, access to the Internet makes me feel so relaxed after having studied so hard.
The paragraph (1) from the task 2 illustrates the uses of verbs and intentional actions in writer’s anticipated experiences of a week without an access to the Internet. The writer used the verbs like use, listen, watch, makes, and feel to visualize the actions that he/she routinely does in everyday life.
Overall, the analysis shows that the writers could employ high frequent words and simple syntax in their writings. The following paragraph from the task 1 illustrates these characteristics.
(2) Internet is one of the important things to me. I spend my time with it about ten hours per day. I like to watch the movies or drama series, listen to music, and read some articles in Facebook. Furthermore, I often use it to communicate with my friends. Nevertheless, I cannot connect the internet when I come back home.
This paragraph (2) has a fairly strong beginning as it states how the Internet is important in the writer’s life by giving examples in the second and the third sentences. Notice that the writer repeated the pronoun “I ” several times in almost all the sentences illustrating that the writer strongly emphasizes personal experiences relevant to the topic. This first-person pronoun was mostly found in the low-rated essays. This might be that a less skilled writer’s attempts to begin writing a sentence and to avoid errors such as third-person pronouns or other ambiguous pronouns. This is advocated by Author’s (2013) study found a high frequency of first-person pronoun like ‘I’ and showed an increase in the uses of first person pronouns or self-referential pronouns in L2 essays which demonstrated L2 writers’ lower proficiency. Likewise, Leki, Cumming, and Silva (2010) stated that the pronoun ‘I’ was one of those first person pronouns that refers to the writer and it was most common making up to 60 percent of total self-referential pronouns found in L2 writings.
3.3.2 Syntactic simplicity
Over 70% (n = 29) of z-scores on the task 1 were equal to or less than the mean value showing that the students were able to write the sentences containing more words and complex syntactic structures than those on the task 2 (57%, n = 23). The researcher investigated in depth found that the texts on the writing task 2 had fewer words and even used simpler syntactic structures. The following two different paragraphs were written by the same student showing the differences of the syntactic structures between those two writing tasks. The first paragraph was on the topic of “Is education useless in the 21st century?”
(3) First of all, learning from schools is really important for children. Schools help their parents for take care of them while they are working. Children can play and meet their friends. It makes them learning each other and learning to handle with people.
With regard to syntax, the writer of the paragraph (3) tends to write choppy sentences resulting the writing unsophisticated and disconnected. The simple structures of syntactic structures apparently demonstrate the ability of the writer as he/she frequently employed simple sentences. In addition, a larger proportion of the frequent words like is, are, and can strongly suggests that considerably less new information is contributed in the text. This is suggested that the uses of transitional words such as moreover, furthermore, then or coordinating conjunctions like and, but, and so might supply the transitional words and/or the cohesive ties across a paragraph resulting the links of the ideas and the expression of the new descriptions to the texts.
Compare the previous example paragraph (3) with the following paragraph from the same writer who wrote the second text on the topic of “A week without access to the Internet.”
(4) Firstly, Thai students lack of taking their responsibility. In the morning, some students are like to attend the class lately. Moreover, they do not realize it will be the reason to lead them to become lazy person.
Furthermore, some of them are likely to procrastinate on their task or duty. They might look like lazy person. But learning online must take a lot of responsibility on them because no one can force or motivate you to do it like learning in class. Then this is the reason that Thai students are not ready for learning online.
The following paragraph (4) shows the uses of because and that illustrating a more elaborated text with more complex syntactic structures. This writer also produced a longer text with less choppy sentences. Besides, the writer employed transitional words (e.g. moreover, furthermore, then) more often to describe the associations between the ideas in the paragraph.
3.3.3 Word concreteness
To explore the word use in the texts, the Coh-Metrix was employed to analyze the content words that are concrete and evoke visual images that readers are easy to recognize and understand. The results of the analysis show that z-scores of the task 2 writing were less than -1.0 meaning that overall the writers tend to use more content words in the task 2 (n=32, 80%) and the texts contain more abstract words that are more complicated to comprehend than those in the task 1 (n = 30, 75%) that the writers tend to use words that convey visual images rather than those that represent abstract concepts.
The following texts are written by the same writer. The following paragraphs illustrate these characteristics:
(5) Basically, education makes life better. Educated people are different from uneducated one in many way, such as attitude, lifestyle, and social status. Even at the present time, there are many jobs that everybody can do without knowledge, but those jobs are not good enough to make a living and to be accepted by society.
By contributing importantly to greater uses of abstract ideas, the writer of the text (5) on the task 2 seems to have in part the abilities to perceive abstract concepts with reference to particular instances (e.g., educated, attitude, lifestyle, and social status) and verbs (e.g. make a living, be accepted) to distinguish relationships among ideas and to express the writer’s experience into the text. This is associated with the writer’s schemas of prior knowledge which he/she shared with readers and could draw on to express himself or herself efficiently and effectively (Hyland, 2018). It can be assumed that the students showed an ability to adapt their writing to the requirements of the task at hand, thus displaying an awareness of linguistic repertoires beyond that of just task 1.
Comparing the paragraphs (5) and (6) written by the same writer, the paragraph (6) contains a fewer number of the abstract words for his/her second writing.
(6) Another important reason that make Thai students are not ready to learn English online is they might not understand what they are learning because they do not have a right direction.
The paragraph (6) tends to be densely written with a larger number of action verbs (e.g. make, learn, understand, and have) to describe the actions the subject might do in each situation. A recent study (Hyland, 2018) also found that their participants often used action verbs to bring their stories alive.
3.3.4 Referential cohesion
The linguistic features and the discourse components of the texts were predictive of the participants’ writing performances on the task 1 and the task 2 writings. As can be seen from the results, a large proportion of the z-scores on the referential cohesion at the mean or less than -1.0 of the task 1 and 2 texts were about half of all texts.
To characterize overall texts, it was found that the students tend to reiterate what is said in the previous sentences with the same words or pronouns. The following example paragraph illustrates this characteristic:
(7) For a decade that the internet has become accessible in Thailand. It makes people’s life more convenient. For example, people do not have to go to the library when they need to find some information, or they can learn new lessons through online courses when they do not want to leave home.
Regarding the referential cohesion item, ‘they’ was repeated three times. The last one of them in the extract “…when they do not want to leave home” shows the redundancy in the paragraph seems to be a flaw because the writer failed to provide the noun they referred to as it was expected to appear.
Consider again by comparing the previous example paragraph with the following extract from the task 2 written by the same student.
(8) As a result, Thai students do not gain adequate learning. For example, English is not our mother tongue language; therefore, the students cannot question about unknown knowledge when they do not comprehend their lesson.
Notice that in this paragraph (8), it extends the semantic domain of the concept of Thai student to include different lexical items like the students and they respectively.
In sum, the findings show that the participants may need to use less frequent words or repeated words but a larger number of lexical items to elaborate their writings and explicitly
express ideas and give new information to their readers. This is to suggest that uses of referential cohesion will reflect the degree to which words and ideas go beyond a text. Consequently, texts that contain relatively high referential cohesion will represent associations between ideas and that are feasible to read (Allen, Likens, & McNamara, 2018).
3.3.5 Deep cohesion
In the analysis of deep cohesion, it was concerned with the degree to which the texts contain causal and intentional connectives in the sentences including causal (because, so), additive (and, moreover), temporal (first, until), logical (and, or), and contrastive connectives (although, whereas) that help readers to form a more coherent and deeper understanding of the causal events, processes, and actions in the texts.
The results of the analyses show that a major range of the z-scores of the task 1 and 2 was 1.0-2.5, which is 62% (n = 25) and 72% (n = 29) respectively. The interpretation of the results depends upon presupposed information contained in the PT criteria. The PT criteria suggest that a higher degree of z-scores is at the questionable or unsatisfactory level, so these high z-scores determine a fewer degree of deep cohesion on both tasks leading to the ambiguous texts.
(9) Firstly, education is essential as of the world today. In the present, the world is moving fast and keep on going. Technologies have developed and are more advanced as time passes. New inventions are being discovered rapidly. Therefore, it is important to keep the knowledge up to the standards of those new innovations.
The paragraph (9) illustrates that the writer attempted to use coordinating conjunction ‘and’ to connect the two different verbs in the present perfect and past participle forms as well as the use of conjunctive adverb ‘therefore’ to make a sequence of sentences. Though conjunction creates cohesion in the paragraph and provides extending and enhancing paragraph, the writer used a few conjunction types in his or her text. As a result, the writer contributed less elaboration in his or her writing. The majority of the texts exhibits a few number of cohesive ties like coordinating conjunctions like and, but, and so, conjunctive adverbs like still and even though that supply cohesive ties across sentence boundaries. The z-scores reflect a fewer number of cohesive ties found in the overall texts causing relatively low in the associations of the lexical and grammatical structures and the less sentence sequences to be understood as connected discourse (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Compared to Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion, Coh-Metrix does not measure ellipses or substitution. Besides, Coh-Metrix does not account for paraphrased elements and semantic inferences, thematic patterning, nor can it track participants across phases of discourse or the clauses.
The analyses provide evidence for the fact that the writers demonstrated linguistic flexibility across the essays that they produced. A majority of the writers wrote longer texts on the task 2 writing compared with those shorter texts on the task 1 writing. A fewer uses of cohesive ties to bind the sentences together cause the unelaborated sentences. In regard to those five discourse components of the texts, the results show that the students’ writing performance on the task 1 and the task 2 writing were at the level of satisfactory, except for the deep cohesion on both tasks 1 and 2 that over 60 percent of the students performed at the level of questionable or unsatisfactory.
The following section demonstrates a further analysis on correlations between the discourse components of the texts that were also investigated and answered to a research question.
3.4 Multiple-variable correlations
Research question 2: Is there any significant correlation among those discourse components of the texts?
The data from the 80 texts were examined to indicate the relationships between the results from the corpus analyses by using the Pearson correlations.
Table 4
Correlations among the variables
Variable | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
1. Nar1 | - | | | | | | | | | |
2. Nar2 | .227 | - | | | | | | | | |
3. Syn1 | − .262 | − .111 | - | | | | | | | |
4. Syn2 | − .156 | .029 | .614** | - | | | | | | |
5. WC1 | − .132 | .145 | − .144 | .066 | - | | | | | |
6. WC2 | − .004 | − .469** | .033 | .087 | .127 | - | | | | |
7. RC1 | .656** | .274 | − .511** | − .167 | .005 | − .102 | - | | | |
8. RC2 | .176 | .482** | − .411** | − .397** | .160 | − .209 | .444** | - | | |
9. DC1 | .099 | − .020 | .148 | − .105 | .114 | − .023 | − .159 | − .006 | - | |
10. DC2 | − .006 | .472** | .144 | .091 | .267 | − .286 | .032 | .300 | .076 | - |
Note. 1 = task 1 writing; 2 = task 2 writing; Nar = Narrativity; Syn = Syntactic Simplicity; |
WC = Word Concreteness; RC = Referential Cohesion; DC = Deep Cohesion; WS = Writing Score; WCo = Word Count |
** Correlation is significant at the .01 level (2-tailed) |
* Correlation is significant at the .05 level (2-tailed). |
The results in Table 4 show the correlations between the z-scores of the students’ writing components. These results indicated that the z- scores of the referential cohesion were found associated with syntactic simplicity on the task 1 (r = − .41, p = .00), and on the task 2 (r = − .39, p = .00) respectively. One possible reason for the associations between the referential cohesion and complex syntactic sentences could be that more proficient writers tend to use deliberately syntactic writing by using cohesion to associate the lexicon with the grammar found in the texts. In doing so, sentence sequences were understood as connected discourse of the texts (Halliday & Hasan, 1976).
Among the variables on task 2 writing, the z-scores of the narrativity were found significantly related to word concreteness (r = − .46, p = .00), referential cohesion (r = .48, p = .00), and deep cohesion (r = .47, p = .00). These relative associations give another indication that the writers were able to tell their stories, expand and connect their ideas through the concrete words and cohesion. Regarding words in texts, more-skilled writers tend to have a greater number of working words to develop their writings, thereby expressing their ability to use sophisticated language and more diversity of words in their writings (Crossley, Kyle, McNamara, 2016; Author, 2018).
The z-scores of syntactic simplicity on the task 1 and 2 were significantly related (r = .61, p = .00). The results interact to a great degree as syntactic sentences and a shorter length of texts can predict the quality of the texts (Polio & Shea, 2014; Bulté, & Housen, 2014; Author, 2018).
All this is to suggest that the degrees of associations of the z-scores of discourse components of the texts are different. The students’ EFL writing performance of using English vocabulary, being capable of extending their concepts and expressing their complexity of English language are related. As a result, the writers tend to develop more ideas around the writing topic as well as employ more sophisticated words in their texts. As reported in the earlier section, a few number of the referential cohesion and the deep cohesion uses interchangeably decreased across the two writing tasks, so their z-scores were found associated.