A Corpus-based Analysis of Coherent Writing Skills of Pakistani English Language Learners

Abstract

Coherent writing skills are essential prerequisites for the construction of the academic discourse, specifically at the undergraduate level. Coherence in writing can be attained via the utilization of textual metafunction. The textual metafunction realized by the Theme-Rheme system organizes ideational and interpersonal meanings in discourse to generate coherence at the local and global levels. The mixed-method research aims to investigate the coherent writing skills of undergraduate Pakistani learners. The Theme and Thematic progression patterns (T/TP) based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) were applied to twenty-five argumentative essays of Pakistani learners retrieved from the International Corpus of Learners English (ICLE). The findings demonstrate that most undergraduate Pakistani English Learners overused prenominals at the onset of clauses and constant thematic progression choices to link the clauses. These two factors formed Pakistani learners’ argumentative writing into descriptive writing, and the underutilization of interpersonal and textual thematic choices further indicated Pakistani learners’ unawareness about the social norms of persuasive writing. The pedagogical implications of this study provide English Language Teachers (ELTs) and English Language Learners (ELLs) with a wide range of explicit lexico-grammatical resources to maintain the coherence at the text level.