Academic Writing Skills of Pakistani English Language Learners: A Case Study

Abstract

Writing an academic language cohesively and coherently is presumed to be a daunting task. It demands a higher-level lexical and grammatical complexity to advance argument and reasoning in a more reflective manner (Ryshina–Pankova, 2010). In this regard, ideational grammatical metaphor (IGM) is highly recommended as a tool to achieve textual cohesion and coherence that are important parameters of argumentative writing. This study aimed at investigating the frequencies and syntactic variations of ideational grammatical metaphors, and their different roles in building cohesion and coherence in PELLs’ argumentative essays. For this purpose, Liardet’s IGM framework (2016) was selected and applied to 50 argumentative essays of undergraduate Pakistani English language learners (PELLs) retrieved from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE).The findings revealed that most PELLs contained a limited understanding of the IGM linguistics resources to develop cohesion and coherence in their texts. Despite the minimal amount of IGMs, PELLs excessively utilized interactional conjunctions, attributive relative clauses, and pronominal clauses in their essays. It is reasonable to assume on the basis of findings that Pakistani English Language learners need systematic learning and practiceof deployment of IGMs to improve cohesion and coherence in their argumentative written texts.