Signposting in upper secondary essay writing in different educational contexts and genres: Exploring pupil usage and teacher practices

Abstract

Essay writing is a central part of upper secondary education, where pupils often face the challenge of composing texts in different genres ranging from scientific investigations to political essays. In their essays, pupils are typically expected to present their arguments in a clear and logical manner, which is often realised by explicitly marking textual relations, referred to here as “signposting”. A host of previous studies have investigated signposting in professional and tertiary-level contexts, but comparatively few have investigated signposting at pre-tertiary levels. This study contributes to the existing research pool by exploring signposts in a corpus of 115 English essays in five different genres written by pupils attending Swedish, Norwegian and British schools. A concordancer was used to scan the essays using 273 search terms belonging to 11 signposting sub-categories. This analysis is supplemented with data from teacher interviews. The findings demonstrate that transitions and exemplifiers, used to signal sentential relations, are central features of essay writing at this educational level. Signposts used to mark structural order, on the other hand, seem to depend on the target genre and on individual preferences. The interview data revealed that the teachers in Norway and Sweden tended to provide pupils with decontextualised lists of signposts, which raises the question of whether teachers should offer more explicit instruction in the pragmatic signalling of textual relations.