Grammatical Structures in the Written and Oral Mode of ESL Students

This study focuses on the survey of frequency and occurrence of phrase structure rules used in the written and oral mode of first year tertiary ESL students. It describes the sentence-embedded structures namely, nominal, adjectival and adverbial. As far as phrase structure rules are concerned, the constituents of the noun phrase, verb phrase, adjectival phrase and adverbial phrase are given structural labels. The researcher made use of the quantitative description of the oral and written structures of 76 first year students enrolled in a language class. The results of the study show that majority of the students write their essay using nominals followed by adverbials and the least used are adjectivals. In the oral mode, the most commonly used phrase structure rules are adverbials, followed by nominals and the least used are adjectivals. Though students have a good command of English in writing and speaking, they should be exposed to different communicative situations and develop a balanced style in expressing meaning using varied grammatical structures.