A STUDY OF FAULTY SUBORDINATORS AND COORDINATORS IN THE COMPOSITION WRITING OF SS2 STUDENTS IN CONCORDIA COLLEGE, YOLA (Published)
The aspects of mechanics and expression are language skills a secondary school student should master at the senior grade. However, difficulties in handling these aspects have been noted in periodic examiners’ reports in English language. Since one of these language pitfalls consistently manifests in English language compositions of students, this study analyses faulty coordinators and subordinators in their essays. Coordinators and subordinators have been viewed from the perspectives of cohesion, discourse analysis, semantics, and syntax. For the purpose of this study a syntactic approach is adopted to answer for faulty coordinators and subordinators in thirty senior students’ essays in Concordia College. This corpus based approach hinges on the theoretical frameworks of Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (1972) and Murthy (2007). A modified schema for analysis of results proves the preponderance of faulty coordinators as against subordinators in essays of senior secondary school students. The study concludes that the faulty coordinators are based on positioning, redundancy and ordering of coordinators. Errors also occur in incomplete paired coordinators, wrong replacement of a coordinator with another coordinator or part of speech, faulty coordinator—subordinator link and faulty coordinators that result from unranked coordination. Errors that concern subordinators are less frequent in the essays of senior secondary students. They occur as a result of faulty subordinators in unranked subordination and fault due to wrong replacement of subordinator with another subordinator or part of speech. Further studies can look at the semantic roles of coordinators and subordinators in meaning-bound analysis, can look at the frequency and types of coordinators and subordinators in the writings of students of a particular age, and can explicate the preponderance of a class of coordinators or subordinators in students’ essays.
Keywords: and syntactic approach, coordinators, expression, subordinators