Intertextuality in Essay Writing by Students in High Schools Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya.

Abstract

This article studied the observance to intertextuality as an element in high school students’ written work. It investigated the texts by students to find out the degree to which they followed the application of intertextuality as a necessary component in the students written texts. Intertextuality refers to the relationship between a given text and other relevant texts encountered in prior experience. It touches on factors, which make the utilization of one text dependent on knowledge of previous information encountered in the text. The use of this aspect in writing is achieved when there is a relationship between a given discourse and other written forms that existed in the past. Communication is paramount in any written text. For dissemination of information to take place, the meaning of the writer must be clear and complete. The objective for this study was to explore the extent to which intertextuality as a standard of textuality was used by high school students in their essay writing. The purpose of this paper was to outline the notion of intertextuality in the essay written the students. The study further checked the structure of the students’ written texts to find out whether they had evidence of fragments of other texts encountered earlier. An experimental research design was used. This called for the use of both experimental and control group. These two were subjected to a pretest and a posttest. Further, the experimental class was exposed to the aspects of intertextuality, after which the two did a posttest. The data collected was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The situation established that the written forms had evidence of borrowing from other areas and that high school students employed the intertextuality in their essays.