THE EFFECTIVENESS OF EFL JORDANIAN STUDENTS’ DESCRIPTIVE WRITING AT KARAK UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, JORDAN

Abstract

The current paper shares interest that many researchers and linguists have highlighted in exploring and investigating lexical cohesion. It, therefore, aims at exploring the effectiveness of the EFL Jordanian students’ descriptive writing. 20 Jordanian university students’ writing compositions were collected and analyzed by the researcher to end of characterizing the effectiveness of their writing based on (1) holistic rating, and (2) Hoey’s (1991, 2005) taxonomy of lexical cohesion. Regarding the analysis of the data, it was found that the average holistic rating was (2.7). Additionally, the analysis showed that simple repetition was overused by the students while the use of complex repetition, simple paraphrasing, and complex paraphrasing was less frequent. Besides that, students tend to neglect to use superordinate, hyponymy, co-reference, substitution, ellipsis, and deixis. The results also showed that the written compositions produced by the EFL students were not effective due to the students’ inability to use the different types of lexical cohesion and to their lack of lexical knowledge.