Abstract:
This thesis is about the use of textual organisers in French narrative essay by students that offer French as a foreign language in Ghana in the six public Colleges of Education. It focuses on the type and the uses of the connectives in the narrative context. Text, questionnaire and structured interview were the instruments used for collecting the data. The data was collected from 156 students and the respondents for the interviews were three tutors. Students were purposively selected for the composition test, meanwhile respondents for the questionnaire and the interview were conveniently sampled. The theories used were text analysis proposed mainly by Charolles (1978), Adam (1990) and Lundquist (1980) and error analysis by Corder (1967) and Porquier (1977). The study relies mainly on mixed approach; analysis are qualitative and quantitative in nature. The results show that most of the textual organisers were used inappropriately. The structural defects at different levels show that the students have problems organising the essay as a whole. In addition, there is a disparity in the use of the textual organisers to form sentences. To solve these problems, the tutors interviewed suggested that teachers must explain with concrete examples the roles that textual organisers play in a text and priority should be placed on the teaching and learning of textual organisers. At the end of the study, pedagogical interventions were suggested to help ameliorate the problems that students face when they encounter the composition of the narrative essays.
