Development of topical structure in college level students' essays :|the case of monolingual Turks, monolingual Americans, and bilingual Turks

Abstract

The present study investigates the topical structure development in the essays written by college level students. Three groups of students participated in the study, these were monolingual Turkish students, bilingual Turkish students and monolingual American students. Data collection took place in two different settings; the Turkish students were enrolled in Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey and the American students were enrolled in Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia. Each participant was required to write an essay on a given topic. The essays were then subjected to the topical structure analysis, an instrument which concerns itself with the relationship among the sentence topics composing an essay. It was found that Turkish essays differed significantly from the English essays in terms of their topical structure. On the other hand, no significant difference was found between English essays written by bilingual Turkish students and monolingual American students from the topical structure perspective. While in the Turkish essays the topical structure was marked heavily by one type of progression, namely the sequential progression, in the English essays there was a more balanced distribution.