An Analysis of the Communicative Skills of Undergraduate Students of the University of Cape Coast from a Linguistic Perspective, Ghana

Abstract

Research has showed that pre-university institutions have a culture and practices which are different from tertiary institutions. Engaging in academic pursuits at the university level goes with challenges. The Communicative Skills (CS) course, a form of Academic Literacy (AL) or English for Academic Purpose (EAP) program at the university level, exposes fresh students to techniques, methods, approaches and some orientation they will require to pursue their undergraduate studies with minimum difficulty. The CS course equips students with skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing. It also emphasizes effective ways of gathering, organizing, recording and retrieving information. In view of the fact that English is the medium of communication in universities in Ghana, various aspects of its structure that may facilitate effective communication are highlighted in the CS course. The CS course equips students with skills that will help them pay attention to grammaticality and conventions of usage in English. In this paper, I focused on the linguistic aspect of the communicative skills of undergraduate students of the University of Cape Coast (UCC). I analyzed errors of grammar and other conventions of usage in the English of the students. The current study was underpinned by the Error Analysis (EA) theory due to its linguistic nature. The analysis of the errors of students revealed that they committed errors of grammar, syntax, morphology and collocation and these affected the communicative functions of the English they used.