VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ HỒNG A TOPICAL STRUCTURE ANALYSIS TO CREATE COHERENCE IN ENGLISH ESSAYS OF FOURTH YEAR STUDENTS AT ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (Phân tích cấu trúc chủ đề để tạo liên kết mạch lạc trong các bài luận tiếng Anh của sinh viên năm 4 khoa Anh, trường đại học Ngoại Ngữ, đại học Quốc Gia Hà Nội) M. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60220201 HANOI- 2016 z VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ HỒNG A TOPICAL STRUCTURE ANALYSIS TO CREATE COHERENCE IN ENGLISH ESSAYS OF FOURTH YEAR STUDENTS AT ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (Phân tích cấu trúc chủ đề để tạo liên kết mạch lạc trong các bài luận tiếng Anh của sinh viên năm 4 khoa Anh, trường đại học Ngoại Ngữ, đại học Quốc Gia Hà Nội) M. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60220201 Supervisor : Professor Hoàng Văn Vân HANOI- 2016 z DECLARATION I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled A TOPICAL STRUCTURE ANALYSIS TO CREATE COHERENCE IN ENGLISH ESSAYS OF FOURTH YEAR STUDENTS AT ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in English Linguistics. Except where the reference is indicated, no other person‟s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the text of the thesis.
Moreover, I hereby declare that all the essays which have been used as the primary source for the research has been allowed to be investigated by the students who wrote the essays and the teacher who rated the essays and all these essays haven‟t been used in any preceding research. Hanoi, 2016 Nguyễn Thị Hồng i z ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been completed without the help and support from a number of people. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Hoàng Văn Vân, my supervisor, who has patiently and constantly supported me through the stages of the study, and whose stimulating ideas, expertise, and suggestions have inspired me greatly through my growth as an academic researcher. Secondly, I would like to give my deep thank to Mr Lê Thành A (the pseudonym name of the lecturer), the lecturer of Literature in English in Vietnam National University, University of Language and International Studies, and he is the rater of the essays which I used as primary source of data for my research.
Last but not least, I am greatly indebted to my family, my friends for the sacrifice they have devoted to the fulfillment of this academic work. ii z ABSTRACT The present paper sets out to investigate English essays of Vietnamese learners using the Topical structure analysis (TSA) developed by Lautamatii (1978). In the population of forty essays written by forth year students at ULIS, VNU, twenty-six essays including thirteen high-rated and thirteen low-rated ones were taken out for two objectives. The first objective is to compare and contrast the physical features of two groups and the topical structures.
The second objective is to establish a possible relationship between the essay holistic evaluation and the type of topical progressions used. Data analysis has revealed the moderately physical differences between two groups in terms of t-units, topical depths, but no significant difference could be found in the numbers of paragraphs and topical structures. In addition, findings also indicated that there was significant difference in the progression proportions used in two groups, especially in parallel progression in body paragraph and the subtypes of sequential progression in introductions and conclusions. iii z TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES. Rationale for the research. Aims and objectives of the research.
Scope of the research. Methods of the study. Significance of the research. Structural organization of the thesis .5 CHAPTER 1 - LITERATURE REVIEW.1 Theoretical background of coherence in written texts .1 Overview of coherence .2 Approaches to coherence .3 Methods for examining coherence in a text .1 Latent semantic analysis.2 Topical structure analysis (TSA) .2 Theoretical background of TSA .3 Review of the related studies .1 The findings of prominent studies.2 The findings of other research .15 CHAPTER 2 – RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .1 Restatement of research questions .3 Principles/Criteria for intended data collection and data analysis .1 Topical Structure Analysis method .2 Data collection techniques .3 Data analysis procedure .23 CHAPTER 3 - FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS.1 The physical features of essays .1 Findings on the essay physical features .1 Numbers of essay T-units, paragraphs and sub-topics .2 Findings on the topical structures of clauses .2 Discussion on the physical features of essays (Research question 1).1 Numbers of t-units, paragraphs, and sub-topics .2 The topical structures of t-units in essays .2 Proportions of topical progressions in essays .1 Findings on the difference between low-rated and high-rated essays .1 Topical progressions used in all essay paragraphs .2 Topical progressions in introductions and conclusions.2 Discussion on the uses of topical progressions .1 Topical progressions in all essay paragraphs and body paragraphs.2 Topical progressions in introductions and conclusions.I vi z ABBREVIATIONS LSA: latent semantic analysis TSA: topical structure analysis Topical S: topical subject Mood S: mood subject ISE: initial sentence element SP(s): sequential progression(s) SP(d): directly related sequential progression SP(i): indirectly related sequential progression SP(u): unrelated sequential progression PP(s): parallel progression(s) EPP(s): extended parallel progression(s) vii z LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1: Essays‟ score description 18 Table 2: The mean, mode, median of the numbers of T-units, 24 paragraphs, and topical depths of low-rated and high- rated essays Table 3: The variation of the frequency of T-units in 25 introductory, body and concluding paragraphs of essays Table 4: The uses of three subtypes of SP in introductions 32 Table 5: The subtypes of sequential in the conclusions 33 Figure 1: The topical structures of clauses in low-rated and high- 26 rated essays Figure 2: The difference on the portions of each type of topical 29 progression in low-rated and high-rated essays Figure 3: The proportions of different types of progression in the 30 body paragraphs of two groups of essays Figure 4: The proportions of different types of progression in the 31 introductory paragraphs Figure 5: The proportions of different progression types in the 32 concluding paragraphs viii z INTRODUCTION 1.
Rationale for the research Coherence seems to be a key indicator of the text quality as it deals with the global and local meanings and the deep organizational logic of the text. The more coherent the texts are, the higher the text quality achieves. In general, evaluating the text coherence is supposed as problematic because coherence has been considered to be a subjective and hazy concept which is hard to learn and teach (Lee, 2002). As Halliday and Hassan (1976) indicated, the distinction between a text and a collection of unrelated sentence is a matter of degree; therefore, the holistic evaluation is quite subjective in measuring text quality because it lacks reliability and validity for not indicating particular strengths and weaknesses of learner texts.
However, subjective reader‟s evaluation on text is still a dominant method in evaluating the text in teaching contexts. Nowadays, a number of investigations have been carried out to examine how coherence is achieved in learner texts and to help the teachers make sound judgments on student compositions. One major method is to analyze the topic development of the high-rated and low-rated essays by applying the Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) developed by Lautamatii (1978). This method helps to examine the links between the reader‟s evaluation and the topical developments of the text to explicitly state the text features for classifying the text quality.
Overall, different patterns (topical progressions) of topical structure appear to provide good predictors of student writing quality. In general, this research investigated the relationship between the holistic evaluation and the TSA of the student essays to find out the differences in topical structures and the topical progressions used between low-rated and high-rated essays. Aims and objectives of the research The research population is the collection of forty essays written by forth-year students at ULIS, VNU. The research aims at investigating the relationship between holistic evaluation and the TSA of the essays by examining thirteen high-rated and thirteen low-rated essays for two main objectives.
The first objective focuses on the physical features of the essays including the numbers of t-units (the shortest unit consisting of one independent clause together with whatever dependent clauses are attached to it), paragraphs, topical depths as well as the topical structures in the essays. The research examines the differences between low-rated and high-rated essays in terms of physical organization and the various combinations of the mood subjects (mood S), the topical subjects (topical S), and the initial sentence element (ISE) of the clauses in the essays in order to identify the contribution of these features to essay quality. The second objective examines the relationship between the text quality and the topical progressions used in student essays. It focuses on examining the proportions of topical progression types (sequential, parallel, and extended parallel) in two group essays.
Particularly, it separately investigates the proportions of progressions used in the introductions, the body paragraphs, and the conclusions of essays to have a view on the contribution of these progressions in the essays. To sum up, the research aims to reveal the physical features, topical structures and progressions that contribute to the quality of the essays. Research questions In order to achieve two main objectives, the research focuses on answering two main following research questions: Research question 1: How do the physical features in terms of lengths and the topical structures reveal the differences between low-rated and high-rated essays of Vietnamese students? Research question 2: What is the relationship between holistic evaluation and the topical progressions used in essays of Vietnamese students? 2 z 4. Scope of the research The research focuses on investigating the English essays written by Vietnamese students.
Particularly the research explores the essays of the forth year students at ULIS, VNU written in their American Literature course in the year of 2013. These essays are chosen as the primary data for the research because of three reasons. Firstly, these essays share many similarities including the same topic which is about Buck‟s conflict in the story “The Call of the Wild”. Secondly, these essays are commented and scored by the teacher, and sent back to the students through email, it brings two advantages for the researcher.
One is the convenience for collecting all the data without difficulty and the other is that the essays had been scored by the teacher; therefore they were an appropriate set of data for searching answers for the research questions. Methods of the study The research applies the TSA framework as developed by Lautamatii (1978) to identifying the relationship between clauses in the paragraphs. The choice of topical structure as the focus of this study is motivated by the following considerations. First, topical structure analysis probes an important aspect of texts, namely the patterns of maintenance and shifts of topics.
Such patterns contribute considerably to the text coherence, to the identification of what a particular stretch of discourse is about, and, consequently, to the comprehensibility of texts. Therefore, this is an objective method for analyzing the student writing. Second, topical structure analysis allows for the quantification of data which makes the study more reliable, because the frequency and percentage of t-units, paragraphs, topical depths, topical structures and topical progression types in student essays are calculated based on the carefully analyzed of essays. In summary, using TSA as a tool for analyzing student essays is the most suitable choice for this research.