Abstract
This study investigates the
discourse features of secondary school students’ essays on flooding and drought
in Sokoto State, Nigeria. The study is motivated by the growing interest in how
learners use language to represent environmental realities within classroom
writing. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly the
concepts of cohesion, lexical cohesion, and thematic development, the study
examines how students organise ideas, deploy vocabulary, and construct meaning
in essays on environmental issues that directly affect their communities. A
qualitative descriptive design was adopted. Thirty essays written by Senior
Secondary II students from three secondary schools in Sokoto metropolis were
purposively selected and analysed. Data were coded and examined for cohesive
devices, lexical patterns, thematic organisation, and evidence of first
language influence. The findings reveal that students rely heavily on additive
conjunctions, especially and, and frequently repeat lexical items such
as farmers, rain, water, and crops. The essays
generally follow a simple organisational structure comprising introduction,
explanation, and conclusion, but many lack elaborate argumentation and logical
development of ideas. The analysis also reveals the influence of Hausa on
English sentence structure and lexical choices, reflecting the multilingual
context in which the learners operate. Despite these limitations, the essays
demonstrate strong environmental awareness rooted in students lived experiences
of flooding and drought in Sokoto State. The study concludes that discourse
competence in environmental writing can be enhanced through explicit
instruction in cohesion, vocabulary expansion, and genre-based writing
strategies.
Keywords: Discourse analysis, Systemic
Functional Linguistics, environmental discourse, student essays, cohesion,
Sokoto State.
DOI: 10.36349/sojolics.2026.v02i01.011
author/Zainab Aliyu Dantsoho
journal/Sokoto JOLICS 2(1) | June 2026 |
