FREQUENCY AND GRAMMATICALITY OF CONDITIONAL CLAUSES IN ESSAYS WRITTEN BY IUS FRESHMAN STUDENTS

This research paper is a descriptive study that analyzes the use of conditional clauses in 170 argumentative essays written by freshman students at the International University of Sarajevo (IUS) in the spring semester of 2023. The essays were written as part of their assessment in the ELIT200 Critical Reading and Writing course, which is a mandatory freshman course at the IUS. The aim of the paper is to investigate the frequency at which conditional clauses occur, their different types, and their grammaticality. Moreover, the paper examines the link between the frequency and grammaticality of the used conditional clauses and the assigned essay topics. The resultsshow that the overall accuracy/grammaticality when it comesto the usage of English conditional clauses is high. As expected, the most frequently used conditional type is the first conditional.