An Investigation of Paragraph Writing Problems Encountered by Level 3 GFP Students: A Case of A’sharqiyah University, Sultanate of Oman

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue V, May 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186

An Investigation of Paragraph Writing Problems Encountered by Level 3 GFP Students: A Case of A’sharqiyah University, Sultanate of Oman

Bashir Abuelnour ELbashir
A’Sharqiyah University, Ibra, Sultanate of Oman

Abstract: This study aimed to identify the writing problems that are faced by level 3 General Foundation Programme (GFP) students and to find suitable strategies to deal with those problems. The study was conducted in A ’Sharqiyah University, Ibra, Sultanate of Oman, in September 2021. The rationale behind choosing level 3 was that teachers at the college level noticed that college students struggle with paragraph writing. The researcher used a descriptive research method (content analysis). Thirty-six level 3 students had been randomly selected and they had been informed to write a paragraph of 100-120 words on a given subject. The students’ paragraphs had been marked twice by six GFP teachers. The purpose was to pick out students’ mistakes and errors. The findings revealed that students encounter different writing problems: word choice, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, tenses, and sentence structure. In the light of those findings, some guidelines had been offered. For instance, students should read a lot; reading develops students’ vocabulary, grammatical structures, and knowledge of the world as well. In addition, the writing teacher should focus more on positive points of students’ writing and not the negative points. Moreover, teachers must praise students for their good attempts. Furthermore, teachers should, regularly, assign in-class writing activities. Finally, the writing teachers should share ideas and strategies on how to cope with paragraph writing problems.

Key words: writing problems, GFP, content analysis, errors, mistakes, writing teacher, positive, negative

I.INTRODUCTION

Writing is one of the most essential language skills. Moreover, it’s essential for expressing ideas, thoughts, and attitudes. People may want to write for different aims: writing e-mails, reports, blogs, letters, notes. Therefore, considering the audience is an important stage whilst writing. For instance, writing can be directed to an individual or a group of audience or it can be directed to a male or female. The target reader may be known or unknown.
Writing styles are formal and informal; formal writing is characterized by using standard English, greater complicated sentence structures, infrequent use of personal pronouns, and absence of colloquial or slang phrases. Informal patterns are characterized by using nonstandard English forms, colloquial words and commonly shorter sentence structures.
The motives for including writing in a second or foreign language syllabus are many. For example, writing encourages learning. Raimes (1983) believes that writing offers learners an opportunity to adventure with the language and to move beyond what they’ve discovered. In addition, Hedge (1988) states that the more students write in the English language classroom, the more their learning improves; for example, to

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