The Influence of Mother Tongue on Essay Organisation Among Senior Secondary School Students in Cross River State

This study examines the influence of mother tongue rhetorical and organisational conventions on formal English essay writing among senior secondary school students in Cross River State, South South Nigeria. Nigerian students' essay writing quality is a persistent concern in WAEC performance data, and the role of mother tongue discourse conventions as a source of organisational interference has been theorised but insufficiently documented with empirical evidence from the South South zone. The study adopts a contrastive rhetoric framework informed by Kaplan's cross-cultural rhetorical model. A stratified sample of 200 senior secondary students, 100 each from Efik/Ibibio mother tongue backgrounds and Bekwarra mother tongue backgrounds, was selected from six schools in Calabar and Ogoja. Participants wrote formal essays under controlled conditions, and the texts were analysed for essay structure, paragraph organisation, cohesion patterns, and deviation from English expository norms. Independent rater analysis and inter-rater reliability measures were applied. Findings reveal distinct organisational patterns attributable to each mother tongue background, including circular argumentation, topic digression, and parallelistic repetition structures that are consistent with rhetorical features documented in oral traditions of the respective communities. These patterns affect text quality ratings significantly. The study recommends explicit contrastive rhetoric instruction in secondary school English teaching to bridge mother tongue organisational conventions and English essay norms. Keywords: contrastive rhetoric, mother tongue, essay writing, Cross River State, secondary school.