A Qualitative Investigation of EFL Students Academic Writings

This paper reports on a qualitative investigation of EFL academic writers’ texts at two different EFL settings: voluntary vs. routine contexts of teaching and learning. Participants at these contexts received a similar pedagogical treatment based on the Sydney genre school conventions for teaching writing. The method of analysis, which was taken from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), concentrated at semantic features of ‘sequences’, ‘figures’, and ‘elements’. Major similarities were observed across participants’ post-test texts. In both contexts, the metaphorical deployment of sequences, figures and elements were increased. The congruent sequences of expansion and projection and the congruent figures of ‘sensing and saying’ and ‘doing and happening’ with ‘conscious things’ in their participants have largely changed into the metaphorical forms including the unconscious metaphorical processes construed as Things. The metaphorical construal was in the deployment of figures for sequences and elements for figures.