AUA Undergraduate Students’ Writing Skills Development in the Freshman Year

Abstract

This study examines a corpus of writing samples produced by undergraduate students in the American University of Armenia (AUA). The corpus is composed of 30 entrance and 30 exit essays written in class for the Freshman Seminar course at the beginning and the end of the 2017-2018 academic year, respectively. The purpose of the study is to explore how the features of the students’ written language change in one academic year by focusing particularly on the use of cohesive devices—linking adverbials (LAs) and attended/unattended demonstratives—and the occurrence of subject-verb agreement errors. The results show that the most commonly used linking adverbials in entrance essays were the additive and causal linking adverbials, while in exit essays the most frequent linking adverbials were the sequential and additive linking adverbials. Adversative linking adverbials were the least common linking adverbials used by the students both in entrance and exit essays. In addition, attended and unattended demonstratives appear to have similar frequencies in the two data points, though no errors were found in exit essays compared to several errors in the use of demonstratives detected in entrance essays. The study also focused on subject-verb agreement error occurrences, the frequency of which was found to be almost the same in the two data points. The study concludes with discussing the pedagogical implications of the findings and the directions for future research.