ABSTRACT
Students are faced with the challenge of using English language to communicate effectively in writing. Essay writing is an important part of their academic activities, which they have to engage in to answer test and assignment questions. The researcher observed over the years of teaching Higher Diploma Students of Kaduna Polytechnic, that students have a problem with being able to write coherent and meaningful essays. Many things could be responsible for such a problem but the researcher chose to examine the extent to which connectives affect the students‘ writing of coherent and meaningful essays. The aim of this study on the Use of Connectives in the Essays of Higher Diploma Students of Kaduna Polytechnic was to carry out a textual analysis of the use of connectives in the essays of this group of students. The objectives were to identify the connectives that students use more frequently in their essays as coordinating, correlating and subordinating devices in their essays; to analyse the extent to which students are able to use connectives to achieve texture in their essays; to highlight the connectives that pose problems to students in their essays and to compare the extent to which the writing of engineering, science and business management students differ when they write essays on topics outside their areas of specialization. The data used for analysis was drawn from students‘ essays. Students were given two essays (one narrative and one argumentative) to write as an assignment. Sixty (60) essays were selected for analysis from these essays (30 narrative and 30 argumentative). A paragraph and a sentence from that paragraph were selected for analysis (clause type, Theme/Rheme, types of conjunctions used (in the selected paragraph) and the frequency of the occurrence of conjunctions in the entire essay). The study was set within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar, and it adopted the works of Halliday and Mathiessen(2004) and Bloor and Bloor(2004) to provide the model for the analysis of the essays. Systemic Functional Grammar was adopted because it is a theory of grammar that is concerned with language as a meaning making resource. The major finding of the research is that students used the coordinating conjunction and more frequently than any other connective and completely avoided using the correlating conjunctions in their essays. Although content was not affected by this, it is obvious that students‘ knowledge of the variety of conjunctions available for use in writing essays is limited. The study recommends that students learn to use a wider variety of conjunctions and punctuate their writing appropriately in order to write coherent and meaningful essays.

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