The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of studies on students' writing, but texts written by students of colleges of education remain largely unexplored. The purpose of this research was to investigate pre-modification of the noun phrases (NPs) in texts written by students in colleges of education (CoEs) in Ghana. A total of three hundred and eighteen (318) texts produced by Levels 100, 200 and 300 students from three colleges of education in Ghana were selected and analysed based on Quirk et al. 's (1985) analytical framework on NPs. It was found that with a total of 3,742 pre-modifications, 1,404 (37.5%) were simple pre-modifiers and 2,338 (62.5%) were complex pre-modifiers. This means that students' writings were filled with more simple pre-modifiers than complex pre-modifiers. In the corpus, pre-modifying adjectives were the most frequently used word class in the complex NPs. The use of these pre-modification types also varied across levels of college education.The present study contributes to knowledge on the noun phrase and academic genres and also has implications for pedagogy and further research.
Although studies on genre abound in the Ghanaian literature, only a few have paid attention to the form and function of Chief Examiners’ Reports on the academic performance of candidates at examinations. To address this gap, the current study analyzes Chief Examiners’ Reports from selected Colleges of Education, covering several disciplines. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive design to examine movement patterns as well as the linguistic devices employed in such reports. Cast in Bhatia’s model of move analysis theory and Kanoksilapatham’s move criteria, the study shows that moves employed include both mandatory and discretionary ones: six (out of the ten) of the moves are mandatory while four are discretionary. Furthermore, the study found that most Chief Examiners’ Reports lack Introduction sections, and there appears to be no standard structure/format in Chief Examiners’ Reports. Regarding stance-taking devices, the study found that only three pronouns, it, they and this were used. It is recommended that Chief Examiners pay critical attention to the Introduction segments of their reports and that a standard format is provided to all Chief Examiners so as to achieve uniformity. Keywords: Genres, Moves, Chief Examiners’ Report, English for Specific Purposes
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