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An Analysis of the Readability of the Essays of First Year Students of Ghanaian Universities - The Case of University of Cape Coast

William Kodom Gyasi, M.Phil. (English), B.Ed. (Arts)

Abstract

In view of the constant complaints of teachers of communicative skills (English for academic purposes) in Ghanaian universities about the unreadable nature of the essays of first year students of Ghanaian universities, an analyses of the readability of the essays of first year students of Ghanaian universities was conducted using University of Cape Coast as a case study. Two hundred and eighty students were selected across four (4) programmes of study namely Business, Arts, Science and Education.

The selected students were made to write an easy on the topic, “Ways of Conserving Electric Energy in the Various Halls of residence of the University of Cape Coast”. Electronic forms of the essays were collected and fed to a computer. Using Microsoft word (2007) version, A Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease analyses of the essays were run. With the aid of SPSS (version 16) frequencies and percentages of the Flesch-Kincaid readability scores were obtained. Other statistical tools like levene’s test of equality of variance, A one-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and t-test were used.

The study revealed that essays of first year level hundred students of Ghanaian universities are largely unreadable. Also gender and programmes of study do not significantly influence the readability of essays of first year Ghanaian university students. Several recommendations were made to improve the readability of first year students’ essay.

Introduction

Studies into the English language proficiency of university students have generally centered on the ability of students to effectively apply the rules of grammar to enhance their linguist competence. In most of these studies, students’ inability or the extent of their ability to apply certain rules of grammar is given prominence. For instance, Gyasi, Nartey and Coker (2011) investigated first year student of University of cape coast knowledge of parts of speech. In this study, it was reviewed that first year students knowledge of parts of speech is shallow, hence their poor performance in language courses.

Yankson, (1994) also mentioned students difficulty in handling tense, spelling and concord. To others, students’ writings are characterized by lack of coherence, weak thematic progression leading to flat paragraph and undeveloped themes (Dako, 1997; Appiah, 2002; Adika, 2003). Interestingly, similar concerns are echoed by teachers of communicative skill (known elsewhere as English for academic purposes) in some Ghanaian tertiary institution. However, a few studies, if any, have gone into the readability of the writings of these students whose linguistic competence is so much criticized.

This study sought to investigate the level of readability of essays of first year students of Ghanaian universities using University of Cape Coast (UCC) students as a case study. Readability indexes are tools that are used to estimate the level of comprehensibility of written texts. They also estimate the number of years of education one needs to have to read and understand a text (Kincaid, Fishburne, Rogers and Chissom, 1975).

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William Kodom Gyasi, M.Phil. (English), B.Ed. (Arts)
Department of Communication Studies
Faculty of Arts
University of Cape Coast
Cape Coast
Ghana
wkodomgyasi@yahoo.com

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