The Structure of the Noun Phrase in the Narrative Writing of Students of Ghanaian Colleges of Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT While the past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of studies on students’ writing, texts written by students of colleges of education remain largely underexplored. The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of noun phrases (NPs) in texts written by students in colleges of education (CoEs) in Ghana. A total of 318 texts produced by Levels 100, 200 and 300 students from three colleges of education in Ghana were selected and analysed based on Krashen’s acquisition theory, Monitor Model Theory (1982), Kinneavy’s discourse theory (1971) and Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1985) analytical framework on NPs. The study found that both simple and complex noun phrases were utilised by students. Findings from the investigation indicated that even though Level 300 students used few complex noun phrases compared to Levels 100 and 200 students, the Level 300 students were more syntactically complex. The results from the one-way ANOVA and its post hoc analysis showed a significant difference between Levels 100 and 300 students as well as between Levels 200 and 300 students in their use of complex noun phrases. Overall, Level 300 students significantly used more complex NPs than students in the other levels. It is recommended that other syntactic complexity analyser tools on the same topic such as Biber Tagger (1999), Coh-Metrix (2014) other than Lu (2011) L2SCA could be employed to assess complexity in future studies to confirm or refute findings of this study. Additionally, I recommend that in further studies, lexico-grammatical features such as relative clauses, prepositional phrases, and nominal clauses, should be analysed to assess complexity since academic language is a multifaceted entity which may be researched in various fields like SLA, Applies Linguistics and Language Testing