Functional sentence perspective (FSP) and the analysis of high school students' writing at Dongrak Wittanya school, Sisaket province

This study examined students’ composition, using the functional linguistic theory known as Functional Sentence Perspective to find out the problems in 14 students’ composition at Dongrak Wittaya School, Sisaket province. The subjects were 7 good language proficiency students and 7 poor language proficiency ones. They were studying in the second semester of the academic year 2007 of Foundation English (E43101).
The research focused on the Functional Sentence Perspective framework developed by Dane(1974), which was later extended to the “Tropical structure anlysis” by Vande Kopple (1985). Results obtained from the analysis of 14 students’ essays revealed more slanted than constant topics. Besides, it was found that the poor writers seemed to illustrate the slanted type of topic more than the good writer (7:1).
These results therefore seem to confirm an expectation that the given and new information in the topic slot could be a good predicting tool for teachers when it came to the students’ writing quality.