Investigating Students’ Awareness of the Most Common Grammatical and Lexical Features of Formality in Writing Academic Essays

Abstract

The overall aim of the present research is to investigate third year LMD students‟ awareness of the most common grammatical and lexical features of formality and their appropriate use in academic essays, in the department of English at Mohammed Seddik Benyahia University, Jijel. The investigation of this study is built on the hypothesis which speculates that third year license students have a lack of awareness which leads them to an inappropriate use of the most common grammatical (syntactical) and lexical features of formality in writing academic essays; The research methods used in this study include a test and an analysis of students‟ essays. The test was administered to 50 participants out of 285 students and the students‟ essays were taken from the same participants. Their performances in the test and their written productions were compared. The overall findings of this analysis revealed that third year EFL students are not aware of the difference between formal and informal writing. In addition, they are unaware of the most common syntactical and lexical features of formality and their appropriate use in academic essays. Moreover, they tend to use an informal style. Hence, this dissertation recommends that third year students should be made aware of the language styles that can be used in different contexts. Through explicit instruction and practice, third year students would acquire enough knowledge about the appropriate use of the syntactical and lexical features that contribute to the formality of academic writing, particularly the essay, which is considered as a common assignment required at the tertiary level either in written expression module or in other content modules.