Sentence Types And Proficiency Levels in Students' Essays: A Case of Achimota Senior High School

ABSTRACT

Essay writing is usually a frequently used mode of testing of language competence in schools in Ghana. Thus, when students write essays, it is mainly for academic purposes. Quite often, for purposes of testing, students are required to use, among other things, a variety of sentence types and this is attested to by the marking scheme of the WAEC English Language Examinations. Again, research evidence appears to suggest that ESL students studying at an advanced level of education use more complex structures than their counterparts at the lower level. This renders the essays of the latter, stylistically monotonous and uncreative. That the research may be able to posit that as one attains a higher level of education correlating to a higher level of language competence, there is the likelihood that one may use a more varied sentence forms and more complex structures in their essays. Accordingly, this study aims to answer the following questions, first, does one use more complex structures as he progresses on the educational ladder? Also, is the choice of the sentence type influenced by the kind of essay? This research thus sets out to study the sentences in the essays of some Senior High School students in Accra by carrying out a grammatical analysis of the types of sentences in these essays. To this end, 244 essays were collected from students in Achimota SHS. These students from form one, two and three were tasked to write a 450-word narrative, expository and argumentative essays on the same topic. The essays were then collected and analysed for their choice of sentence patterns. Contrary to earlier findings that ESL students studying at an advanced level were able to identify complex structures and used them for fluency and style, this study has proved that the use of simple and complex structures are not distinctive features of students’ essays at an advanced or lower level of education (in this case, SHS 1, 2 & 3). However, the choice of a particular sentence type is largely determined by the kind of essay.