A Transitivity Analysis Of English-Written HND Research Project Abstracts In Public Administration Discipline

Abstract

This study is concerned with transitivity analysis of selected English-written HND research project abstracts in public administration discipline. The aims of this research are to study the kinds of transitivity processes that are used by the students in their research project abstracts; how the processes are realised by the students in their research project abstracts; and why the processes are realised in the students' research project abstracts in the way they are. This study adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The data were obtained from the final year Higher National Diploma 2 projects (HND2) of Public Administration students, at Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro, Ogun State, Nigeria. The corpus contained 100 research project abstracts, which were randomly selected from five sessions (that is, 2017/2018, 2018/2019, 2019/2020, 2020/2021, 21/22). Five abstracts were taken from each session respectively. The result of the research was five types of process that occurred in the students' research project abstracts. There were material process (61.6%), mental process (8.1%), relational process (18.6%), verbal process (3.5%), and existential process (2.3%). The dominant type of transitivity is material process. It means that students' final-year research project abstracts contain action and physical activities. Furthermore, the benefit that can be gained from analysing the transitivity in the text could stimulate the research writing skills of the students to comprehend the idea and information in a text that could be applied in spoken and written texts. We suggest to the teachers and students to adopt functional grammar when writing/teaching research writing, so that the students would be motivated to understand and write in clear ways.