ERRORS OF UNITY AND COHERENCE IN SAUDI ARABIAN EFL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ WRITTEN PARAGRAPH - A CASE STUDY OF COLLEGE OF SCIENCE & ARTS, TANUMAH, KING KHALID UNIVERSITY, KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA

Abstract

This study investigates errors of unity and coherence in a paragraph written by the Fourth - Level students at the College of Science and Arts in Tanumah, King Khalid University. The purposes behind this study are to investigate, identify and analyze errors of unity and coherence committed by EFL university students in paragraph writing, moreover to identify the possible causes of these errors and to suggest ways of overcoming these problems. Furthermore, to provide suggestions for teaching and learning English paragraph writing to EFL university students. The study uses both testing and interview as primary sources for data collection. The findings indicate that students commit errors in unity and coherence, and that is their written performance is characterized by ineffective organization of the ideas, lack of transitional markers and the misuses of cohesive markers, the students’ written paragraphs, in general, are characterized by an inconsistency in tense, faulty parallelism, omission of linking words and wrong selection of pronouns. The study concludes that students' problems with writing coherent and unified paragraph are attributed to many factors such as EFL students’ insufficient knowledge about techniques of coherence and unity of paragraph writing in addition to their lack of motivation. Besides interference of EFL learners’ mother tongue in EFL learning process and inappropriate teaching strategies and techniques employed by teachers in teaching coherence and unity of English paragraph writing. It is recommended that EFL university instructors should focus on giving ample practice on the elements of achieving unity and coherence of paragraph writing in addition to that they should give immediate feedback to students and encourage them to read a lot.  Article visualizations