Textual Competence in The Writings of Thai Students Majoring in German: A Case Study in Writing Narrative Texts with Variations in Language Use

Abstract

The main purpose of the study is to investigate German writing competence in narrative texts of Thai undergraduate students under aspect of variations in language use following Schmölzer-Eibinger’s indicators [5]. The participants are a purposive sampling consisting of 10 third-year students majoring in German at Srinakarinwirot University. Each student is assigned to write one text per week for three weeks. Therefore, there are 30 texts in total to analyze. The results revealed that most students cannot formulate narrative texts well. They solely use basic adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and sentence structures by beginning sentences with subjects. Only a small number of students can create their texts using various modifiers, sentence structures, and subordinating conjunctions. Moreover, many grammatical errors are found when students use complex structures and they affect comprehensibility in some parts of the text. The most frequent errors are subject-verb conjugation, adjective declension, verb tenses, and the position of verbs in the subordinate clauses. Furthermore, most students struggled to apply their German language knowledge to writing the texts. The main reasons are that students lack experience of writing German texts and have little language awareness of German writing.