Writing Errors of Grade Nine Students: Basis for Sentence Writing Module

Abstract

Introduction

DepEd. Order no. 39 series 2012 on Policy Guidelines on Addressing Learning Gaps and Implementing a Reading and Writing Program in Secondary Schools states that the results of the pre-assessment or diagnostic test indicate the areas of strength and development that should be the basis for designing appropriate intervention programs, i.e., whether for enrichment or remediation. Therefore, conducting remediation or intervention could help learners in their writing difficulty. About this, the studies of Cabansag (2013), Hussen (2015), Gustino and Magno (2012), and Catabay (2016) just focused on assessing the writing errors of the students. They did not consider remediation or intervention on the writing difficulties they found out. To fill the gap on these researches, this present study would like to develop a learning module as an intervention to elevate the students' level and minimize their writing errors (Al-Buainain, 2007) that will be based on the actual writing samples of students' sentence writing problems which is a primary instrument to utilize in identifying writing difficulties (Afrin, 2016).

Methods

This study determined the sentence writing errors of the grade nine students at Dolores National High School, Magalang, Pampanga, Philippines. Seventy grade nine students served as the respondents of the study. The holistic sentence rubric, California Education Language and Development Test (CELDT), was used in analyzing the written sentences of the respondents. The statistical tools such as mean, frequency and ranking, and T-Test Independent Variable were used.

Results

The findings revealed that both in pretest and posttest, capitalization was the most persistent sentence error in the mechanical category and wrong word choice in the structural category. However, the use of prepositions was the most persistent error under the grammatical category for pretest only since the tense/form of verb became the most persistent error in the posttest. The grade nine students' level of writing performance in pretest fell from emerging communication to basic communication in the posttest after the conducted intervention.

Discussions

The respondents' most persistent sentence error in pretest in each category had a highly significant difference to their most persistent sentence error in the posttest. It also revealed that the respondents' scores in the pretest had a highly significant difference to their scores in the posttest. The sentence writing module was strongly agreed upon by the validators with an overall mean of 4.65.