Systemic Textual Analysis: Metaphorical Competence In Esl Student Writing

Kathpalia, S. , & Carmel, H. (2011). Metaphorical competence in esl student writing. RELC Journal, 42(3), 273-290

The focus of this article is to analyze student writings and identify the different problems that ESL/EFL writers have with metaphors, collocations, and figures of speech. It also attempts to show the importance of teaching metaphors and collocations to students. The article cites research that shows that figurative language takes more time for ESL/EFL students to read because they are unable to understand figurative language as chunks, or collocations, and have to analyze them one word at a time. The article makes the point that it is important to teach students metaphorical language for several reasons, students must be able

STA has the benefit of showing students the step-by-step progression of a text and its’ organization.This allows students to see how the individual units of a text, clause, the possible patterns of the clause structure, and the various ways that clauses can link together. This is important because to become proficient writers students must be able to create and utilizing clauses in logical and coherent ways. The study that this article gets its data from was conducted in a fourteen week undergraduate course from a university in Brunei. One student was asked to read a scientific article and write review about it. After a first attempt at writing the review the student was then presented with various models of article reviews and asked to rewrite the review. The study concluded that there was indeed progress made and STA helped improve student writing, however, the progress was limited. One explanation for this is that two weeks is insufficient for maximal profess or development, and perhaps given more time further progress could be made. Given the limited success of the STA in the classroom, perhaps a limited application is the best amount. I believe that STA has its’ place in the classroom, unfortunately progress is slow, and is best used in limited