Investigating Correspondences between the Informal Features in Teacher Talk and Students’ Academic Essay Writing

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the correspondences between the informal features in teacher talk and in students’ academic essay writing. It has been hypothesized that if the teacher uses formal language when lecturing, students’ essays will contain few or no informalities and vice versa. To test this hypothesis, a descriptive analysis has been conducted on 80 exam essays of third year students of English at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University, Jijel. The exam essays have been selected randomly from two content modules, namely, Didactics and Cognitive Psychology. In addition, a questionnaire was administered to eight teachers who teach third year content modules and require the essay as the form of answering in examinations. The results obtained from both research instruments have shown that third year students of English at Jijel university were not competent enough to produce an essay that meets the standards of academic writing in their examinations. The respondents attributed that to the lack of practice, lack of exposure to academic texts, and students’ habits of copying and memorizing teacher talk as it is presented in the lectures. Moreover, some informal features in teacher talk were found to correspond with those in students’ examination essays, other were not. Students used many informalities particularly at discourse level in which some correspondence is established between teacher talk and students’ essay writing basically in the use of reference pronouns, casual spoken language, and sentence initial conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘but’. A slight correspondence is noticed in the use of grammatical and syntactical features which revealed that students are, to some extent, competent grammatically and syntactically. However, little correspondences were established between teacher talk and students’ essay writing in terms of lexis.