The Impact of Grammatical Accuracy and Discoursal Features on the Quality of EFL M.A Students' Written Performance at Sudan University of Science and Technology.

Abstract

This research investigates the impact of the grammatical accuracy and discoursal features on the quality of EFL M.A. students' written performance at Sudan University of Science and Technology. As the main objective is to observe this impact, the researcher distributed an essay test to the second batch of M.A students of English at Sudan University of Science & Technology in 2013 in order to measure their abilities in these grammatical and discoursal features. 50 students were asked to write an essay entitled " The Challenges Facing Education in Sudan". To support the obtained data, 30 copies of a questionnaire were administered to 30 university teachers, particularly, those who teach at the graduate level. The data collected through both tools have been statistically analyzed by using the SPSS. After applying the descriptive analytical method for both research tools , the researcher has come up with some conclusions that M.A students are very poor in grammar and the discoursal features of cohesion, coherence, thematization & contextualization with percentage 73.5. This poor use of grammatical aspects and discoursal features, according to the overall results has minimized the quality of their written essays. Therefore, the researcher recommends exposing students to intensive grammar and writing skill courses that adopt Systemic Functional Linguistics theory; as it covers all aspects of discourse which are essential to texts' writing so that students can understand and practise them, otherwise writing skill will remain a problem.