Paragraph writing problems faced by hutech undergraduate students
PARAGRAPH WRITING PROBLEMS FACED BY HUTECH
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Nguyen Hoang Thanh Quyen
Department of Foreign Languages, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HUTECH)
ABSTRACT
Writing is one of the four necessary skills of language learning and has been an issue of concern for many
ESL teachers and researchers. With the popularity of the Internet and electronic devices, people usually
compose short text messages or send brief notes to colleagues rather than write a long academic paragraph
or essay (Scrivener, 2011). Due to the lack of practice, a lot of ESL learners find this skill very difficult
and challenging. Therefore, the study is carried out with a view to exploring the problems that HUTECH
undergraduate students face in paragraph writing and the factors that hinder their writing ability. The
paper consists of a brief literature review about the definition and roles of writing. Followed is the
consideration of the research aims and methodology. After that, the research findings are analyzed and
discussed. Finally, some recommendations of teaching writing are offered.
Keywords: Challenges, language, paragraphs, problems, teaching, university students, writing skill.
1. LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1. Definition
Writing is an important productive skill especially in the field of English for Academic Purposes because
it is the medium used to express the ideas of learners (Harmer, 2007). According to Hyland (2003),
language learning improvement is strongly associated to writing improvement. A text produced by an
effective ESL learner must be cohesive, logical, interesting, rich in vocabulary, well-structured and
properly organized (Hall, 1988). A successful writer needs to have a good command of appropriate and
strategic use of the language together with grammatical accuracy and communicative competence
(Hyland, 2003). Writing is a linguistic skill that tests students‘ memory, cognitive ability, and verbal usage
in order to successfully convey their ideas (McCutchen, 1984; Nickerson, Perkins & Smith, 2014).
2. THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING
Writing skill plays an important role in ESL learners‘ study. It helps students to reinforce other linguistic
skills such as grammar, vocabulary, use of idioms, punctuation and capitalization. It facilitates their
assignment writing, written tests and future careers. Furthermore, students can utilize writing skills for the
sake of their own writing. It means they can use it to express their ideas, feelings, emotions, and things
that happen in their life (Meyers, 2009). In other words, if students are proficient in writing, they have
better chance to succeed in their study and career. Writing skills have attracted the attention of researchers
for the last twenty years and there have been a number of research carried out to find out diverse problems
that ESL students are facing (Hyland, 2003; Haider, 2012).
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2.1. Writing problems of ESL learners
Writing problems can be divided into different categories including linguistic, pedagogical and cognitive
challenges (Hyland, 2003). First, students fail to produce qualified academic texts due to the lack of
syntactic, lexical and grammatical command of English (Rico, 2014). They struggle with complex
grammatical patterns, paraphrasing, summarizing, word choice, punctuations, and writing styles. Second,
teachers are the next factor that affects student‘s learning. Teachers do not provide enough information
about how to learn this skill or have appropriate teaching methodology such as providing writing prompts,
giving effective feedback or supplying adequate practice (Pineteh, 2013). The first two factors create the
psychological and cognitive hindrance in student‘s writing process. As they do not feel confident with
their linguistic competence and lack the appropriate guide from teachers, students lose interest and
motivation in this subject. They feel unclear about the significance of second language writing and hold a
negative attitude towards their writing study.
METHODOLOGY: The study was carried out to answer the following research questions.
– What are the major mistakes that undergraduate students in the Department of Foreign Languages
of HUTECH University make in the module of Writing 2?
– What are the factors that affect these students‘ writing skill?
– What are the solutions to these problems?
The design of the research was a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The quantitative
method was used to analyze HUTECH students‘ written samples in the module of Writing 2. Fifty written
samples were randomly collected and were examined in the areas of paragraph organization (unity and
cohesion), grammar (tense, subject-verb agreement, singular and plural, preposition, article, run-on,
fragment, spelling, and punctuation), vocabulary (word usage, word form, word order), and writing styles.
On the contrary, the qualitative approach was utilized to find out insights of students by using focus group
interviews. The interview took place at HUTECH university and lasted for an hour. There were 25 females
and 15 males taking part in this interview. The group was divided into 4 smaller groups. The researcher
interviewed each group individually using the questions below:
– What are the difficulties or challenges that you face when writing a paragraph in English?
– What factors or reasons affect your writing skill?
FINDINGS: The analysis of the written samples and the interviews reveals the following results:
Unity and Cohesion
According to the analysis of students‘ written paragraphs, 70% of the students made mistakes in paragraph
organization. Students omitted either the topic sentence or the concluding sentence. Sometimes, they
developed the topic sentence into a long introduction. Besides, they tended to develop ideas that were not
connected to the topic. The reason why they made that mistake is because they did not write a good topic
sentence. The topic sentence might be too broad, too specific or lacked the controlling idea. Without the
controlling idea, writers can easily write irrelevant ideas in the paragraph and cause confusion to readers.
Here is a typical example of unity error from a student‘s paragraph:
“My room is simple but lovely. There are a desk, a shelf, a closet, a bed and a teddy bear. The most
important thing in my room is a hamster cage for my lovely hamster. She is a gift from my sister on my
birthday. She is so smart. When I call her, she pretends to be dead.”
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As we can see, the student went off-topic when he or she started describing his or her hamster. He or she
forgot the controlling idea of the paragraph, i.e. ―My room is simple but lovely.‖
Next, 75% of the written samples had paragraph cohesion problems. The paragraphs usually lacked
organization, transitional words and cohesive devices. Students did not organize their paragraphs in the
order of time, space or importance. They tended to jump from one idea to another, which confused
readers. Here is an example in which descriptive details were put in the wrong spatial order:
“My house has three floors. It is located in Binh Thanh District. There are a living room, a kitchen, a
bathroom and two bedrooms. The view from house is beautiful. My house is lovely and near the shopping
center. The neighbors are helpful and friendly. There is also a garage in my house. It is a cozy house. I
feel warm and safe whenever I get home.”
2.2. Grammatical problems
Errors were mostly found in the grammatical area. Students made the wrong use of subject-verb
agreement, singular and plural, tenses, prepositions, articles, and sentence structures. Also, run-on
mistakes happened a lot in students‘ writing. Their sentences could be a combination of three or four
separate sentences without correct punctuations. For example, a student wrote, “My room is on the second
floor, it is big and comfortable, it makes me feel relaxed.” In addition, fragment was a prominent mistake
in writing, too. Students did not realize their sentence lacked a subject or a verb. For example, a student
wrote, ―Things that will make me have a good mood.‖ Another student wrote, ―Sometimes, lying in the
bed, looking at the luminous stars on the sky.‖ Next, plenty of spelling mistakes were also found. Some
common spelling errors were ―accomodation, goverment, achive, adress, dissappoint, Febuary, etc.‖
Punctuation mistakes occurred a lot because students forgot to capitalize proper names, use commas, and
add apostrophes.
2.3. Lexical problems
Incorrect use of word forms were found in 74% of the written samples. Students were confused between
different word classes. Some examples are: “My teacher is a dedication person.”/ “My father is a
determine man.” /“I felt interesting in his story.” Similarly, words were usually placed in the wrong
order. Students forgot the order of direct and indirect objects, the order of time expressions, and the order
of adverbs. Typical examples are: ―I fed some sausages the dog.‖ / ―In the morning, they will depart.‖ /
―I was hungry extremely.‖
3. WRITING STYLES
The students‘ written samples show that students used a lot of informal and spoken phrases in their
writing. For example, a student wrote, ―The first time I saw her on TV, I said omg, unbelievable.‖ Or
another wrote, ―Let’s talk about four steps of making an omelet.‖
Other factors (Idea expressions, teaching methodology & students’ lack of motivation).
According to the interviews, 95% of the students agreed that they lacked a lot of words to write. They
could not come up with the right word to express their thoughts. Moreover, many students admitted that
they lacked ideas, too. They said that they needed to do some research on the topic in order to gather
ideas, knowledge and prepare necessary vocabulary. Additionally, the interviews discovered that
ineffective teaching methodology was an important factor that hinders students‘ writing ability. 90% of
the students reported that teachers did not provide much practice. Teachers just presented some sample
paragraphs and asked students to follow. Students did not know where to start and what to write. Besides,
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students could not get useful and regular feedback from the teachers. Because of these inappropriate
teaching methods, students lost interest and found this subject quite boring.
4. TEACHING IMPLICATIONS
Several teaching recommendations can be proposed from the findings. First, it is highly recommended to
include a grammar module before the writing module so that students can have a strong foundation in
grammatical rules. In terms of vocabulary expansion and writing style improvement, teachers should
encourage students to get exposed to original English texts, books, novels, or songs. Keeping a diary or a
writing journal is also a good idea to develop the habit of writing. Working in pair is good way for
students to learn from each other. For each writing lesson, it is suggested to provide students with words
or phrases related to the topic or writing genre. Then teachers should guide students to write several short
sentences before asking them to write a whole paragraph. It is essential to provide prompts regarding
grammar points, vocabulary, and ideas to students for their practice in classroom. Essentially, teachers
should not forget to give instant, constructive and critical feedback to students‘ paper. Based on the
feedback, students can recognize their mistakes, understand what they have achieved so far and feel
motivated for future writing tasks. Last but not least, with the popularity of the Internet, writing teachers
can introduce some websites of learning writing to students. Typical pages are Grammarly, Grammar Girl,
The Purdue Writing Lab, Grammar Monster, or Pro Writing Aid. These pages offer free resources to
punctuations, prepositions, articles, prepositions, etc. Queries about grammar and writing styles are posted
and answered here. Besides, these applications suggest synonyms and related phrases in case writers lack
sufficient vocabulary. These sites also have features of automatically checking mistakes and editing texts
and passages. If writers are not satisfied with the checking of the application, they can have their written
texts checked by other qualified and professional writers.
5. CONCLUSION
The research is conducted with the aim of examining problems that HUTECH undergraduate students face
in writing a paragraph in English. The study reveals a variety of issues that affect students‘ writing
competence. Pedagogical implications are given to improve the quality of teaching writing in the future.
Although the findings of the paper can be generalized to ESL learners at university level, the validity of
the research is still limited because the sample size is fairly small.
REFERENCES
[1] Haider, G. (2012). An insight into difficulties faced by Pakistani student writers: Implications for
teaching of writing. Journal of Educational and Social Research, 2(3), 17-27.
[2] Hall, D. (1988). Writing well. Little, Brown and Company, Boston.
[3] Harmer, J. (2007). The practice of English language teaching. (4th ed.) Harlow: Pearson Education
Ltd.
[4] Hyland, K. (2003). Second language writing. Ernst Klett Sprachen.
[5] McCutchen, D. (1984). Writing as a linguistic problem. Educational Psychologist, 19(4), 226-238.
[6] Meyers, A. (2009). Writing with confidence: Writing effective sentences and paragraphs. (9th ed.)
Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.
[7] Nickerson, R. S., Perkins, D. N, & Smith, E. E. (2014). The teaching of thinking. Routledge, United
Kingdom.
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[8] Pineteh, E. A. (2013). The academic writing challenges of undergraduate students: A South African
case study. International Journal of Higher Education, 3(1), 12.
[9] Rico, L. J. A. (2014). Identifying factors causing difficulties to productive skills among foreign
languages learners. Opening Writing Doors Journal, 11(1), 65-86.
[10] Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning teaching: A guidebook for English language teachers. (3rd ed.)
Oxford: Macmillan.
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