Usage, Syntactic Maturity and Syntactic Development of Subordinate Clauses Among NUL Students

Abstract

Many scholars became interested in looking at the syntactic maturity of students in their writing. In
investigating this, they set themselves different measures. The current study explores usage, syntactic
maturity and syntactic development of subordinate clauses among the National University of Lesotho
(NUL) second and third year English language and Linguistics students. They were requested to perform
the task ofwriting an essay on given topic. The findings of the present study reveal that NUL students have
a reasonably high level of syntactic maturity in their writing as shown by how they used subordinate
clauses. The data also demonstrate that there is no difference between second and third year students as
far as the use of subordinate clauses is concerned. The study concludes that one year difference between
the two years of study is not a great difference academically, which is why there is no difference in syntactic
development in NUL students’ writing as measured through the use of subordinate clauses.