AN ASSESSMENT OF THE PRACTICES AND CHALLENGES OF STUDENTS’ PARAGRAPH LEVEL WRITING: WOLKITE UNIVERISTY, SECOND YEAR ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITRATURE STUDENTS IN FOCUS

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to assess the practices and challenges students’ paragraph writing. The study is carried out in wolkite university special reference to second year English language and literature major student in focus. The researcher is employed 12 students to fill questioner. In order to achieve the objectives, the study employed three data gathering tools: closed-ended and open-ended questionnaires, interview for teachers and document analysis. The questionnaire is employed to identify student student’s response by figures and descriptive method. The document analysis, which used to find out student’s paragraph writing problems and identify factor that affects the quality of paragraph written by students. Furthermore, the interview is employed to identify what the writing teachers were doing when they teach paragraph writing, challenges, that hinder students in paragraph level writing. All the data collected using different tools were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively .the study identified the major paragraph writing challenges students encountered. These are problem of organization, unity, process, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and spelling. in addition ,factors that were affecting student’ paragraph writing were divided into students related factors like lack of knowledge of strategic use, students writing apprehension, shortage of vocabulary and lack of regular practice, and teachers related factors such as teachers’ ways of giving feedback. Therefore, since paragraph writing is a skill that could be improved through sufficient practicing, second year major English language and literature students should be practice a lot and use grammatical rules for good paragraph writing.