<![CDATA[This study aims at investigating the types and frequency of clauses used by fifth-semester EFL students in argumentative writing and how they are structured and used in their writing. We used a descriptive qualitative research design with 33 students selected based on purposive sampling. The data were collected using a documentation approach in which students' argumentative essays were used as a primary source and analyzed using the interactive model of data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing/verification. We found that students used four types of clauses (independent clauses (206; 65.39%), adjective clauses (41; 13.1%), noun clauses (35; 11.11%), and adverbial clauses (32; 10.15%) out of 315 clauses in total. In general, independent clauses dominated their writing as the students used simple sentence structures while dependent clauses (in most cases) were used correctly but were found to contain errors in terms of relative pronoun selection, noun clause elaboration, and subordinate conjunction use. These results suggest that students have a basic understanding of clause variety but explicit instruction on combining clauses is still needed to enhance the syntactic complexity and argumentative quality of their writing.]]>
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