Systemic Functional Linguistics as a Strategy to Assess the Academic Writing of Students at Walter Sisulu University

Abstract. This paper reports on the study undertaken at Walter Sisulu University (WSU) in South Africa between2003 and 2007. It explores students’ academic writing which affects their academic performance. The main focusis on the written texts of 20 students who most of them come from rural background. Their texts were analyzedusing systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an analytical tool. This paper demonstrates that there is a need toimprove students’ academic writing in order to improve their academic performance.