Formality in students’ academic writing: implications from assignments written by kabale university postgraduate students.
| dc.contributor.author | Nowe, Promise | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-02-13T07:19:27Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-02-13T07:19:27Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This study investigated formality in students’ academic writing with particular attention to assignments written by Kabale University post graduate students. The specific objectives of the study were to: Identify the level of lexical formality in students’ academic writing, describe the quality of students’ academic writing in terms of lexical richness, and explore the quality of students’ academic texts in terms of syntactic formality. Halliday’s Register theory (1978), was the main theory used for this study, reinforced by Heylighen and Dewaele’s (1999) framework of features of formality as well as Chang and Swales (1999) features of informality. Qualitative methods were used through document review, and analyzed through content analysis specifically by categorization, frequency counts, interpretive frames, and the Type- Token Ratio (TTR) calculation. The results of the findings indicated that the post graduate student’s academic texts were found to be highly formal at lexical level with an F- Score at 71.9%., and the quality of postgraduate students’ academic writing in terms of lexical richness was relatively low, at 49.4%, The findings further showed that students’ academic writing was relatively formal syntactically, reflected in the high frequency rates of complexity, Nominalization, use of discourse markers, and average passiveness, among others. The study concluded that the students’ academic writing was generally formal and recommended formal training to university students for improvement of academic writing formality and reinforcement of the scholarly writing and publications course unit being taught one semester at the university. one of the course units taught at the university. For further studies, the study recommended a study on semantic, morphological, phonological and grammatical formality in both post and undergraduate. students’ academic writing. | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Nowe Promise (2024). Formality in students’ academic writing: Implications from assignments written by Kabale University postgraduate students [Unpublished manuscript]. Kabale University. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12493/3064 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Kabale University | |
| dc.rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ | |
| dc.subject | academic writing | |
| dc.subject | formality | |
| dc.subject | postgraduate students | |
| dc.subject | assignments | |
| dc.subject | Kabale University | |
| dc.subject | linguistic features | |
| dc.subject | student writing | |
| dc.subject | higher education | |
| dc.subject | Uganda | |
| dc.title | Formality in students’ academic writing: implications from assignments written by kabale university postgraduate students. | |
| dc.type | Thesis |