Exploring Academic Writing Competence of Foundation in Science Students through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine the academic writing competence of Foundation in Science students in a private university by analysing their situational essay writing from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. Specifically, the study sought to investigate how students’ linguistic choices reflected their ability to construct meaning, organise ideas, and adopt an appropriate academic stance as they prepared to progress into the MBBS programme. A qualitative method was employed. The data comprised situational essays produced by ten Foundation in Science students. The essays were subjected to thematic analysis to identify recurring linguistic patterns associated with ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions, focusing on transitivity choices, mood and modality, and thematic progression as key resources for meaning-making across the texts. The data were further organised and categorised using NVivo software. The findings revealed that the students demonstrated an emerging awareness of conventional essay structure and basic content development. Nevertheless, their writing exhibited limited control over academic lexical resources, complex clause constructions, and cohesive devices. The essays frequently relied on simple sentence structures and descriptive or narrative expressions, with minimal use of evaluative language and logical connectors, indicating partial development of academic discourse competence. The study yielded important pedagogical implications for foundation-level education. It suggested that explicit, SFL-informed instruction could enhance students’ understanding of how linguistic resources function in academic writing, thereby supporting the development of coherence, critical stance, and disciplinary literacy required for success in medical education.