A topical progression analysis of 4th year tourism majors' essay, writing, faculty of liberal arts, Ubon Ratchathani University

This study examined Tourism students opinion paragraph writing by using a framework known as a Topical Structure Analysis to investigate writing quality of 20 students who enrolled in the Paragraph Writing Course offered at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Ubon Ratchathani University. The topic of writing was “The Ministry of Education recently the opening of its program English Speaking Year 2012”. They studied in the first semester of the academic year 2013.
The researcher focused the Topical Structure Analysis framework developed by Lautammatti (1978) and Simpson (2000). Results obtained from the Analysis of 20 students showed that in the good writing group, the parallel progression occurred 31% followed by the extended parallel progression 26%, 24% of the new topic, 18% of sequential progression and 8% of extended sequential progression. In contrast, in the bad writing group, the parallel progression occurred 33%, followed by the new topic 27%, 26% of sequential progression.
These results seem to indicate that the higher number of new topic and parallel progression may lead to low quality writing. In contrast, the larger number of extended parallel progression and a fewer number of new topic could result in good quality writing.