An analysis of discourse structure in students' essay writing: a case study of fourth-year English major students at Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat university

This study analyzes essays written by forth-year English majors at Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat University. Essays of thirty students were analyzed in terms of the organizational structure and coherence. The result of the study showed that most students have awareness of an essay’s organization, having completed their essays with the basic required elements-the introduction, the body and the conclusion. However, a closer examination revealed many problems with each element in nearly every essay. The introduction was found to be too weak to grasp readers’ attention. This was due to the fact that many students’ thesis statements were not clear expressed. The body was written vague topic sentences and illogical or otherwise irrelevant supporting details. Organization problems caused many paragraphs to be incoherent. At the essay level, incoherence was also the chief problem, as many body paragraphs did not related to the thesis statement in the introductory paragraph. Finally, the concluding paragraphs were somewhat too long, with disconnected ideas. Due to the problems stated above, the students largely failed to write satisfactory essays.