Difficulties in Academic Writing of Grade 11 Students: Basis for a Proposed Learner's Module

Abstract

Introduction

Writing is extremely important in today's society. This is because, in today's dynamic world, writing is a part of the curriculum to utilize one's intelligence, education, and critical-thinking skills. The study focused on the difficulties of Grade 11 students in academic writing specifically the overall quality of the academic essays of the students by providing a basis for a proposed learner's module about essay writing to enhance the skills of learners in writing. Further, it analyzed the quality of the academic essays of the students in the four schools in Cluster I of the Division of Pampanga covering the school year of 2018-2019.

Methods

The study utilized a mixed-method research design to provide a more in-depth perspective of the study. To gather the needed data, the researcher used a researcher-made checklist patterned after the criteria set enriched by Valdez (2016) in evaluating academic essays.

Results

Findings show that the students have difficulties in writing academic essays such as lack of variety of ideas about a certain topic in terms of content and ideas, lack of connectives and lack of cohesion and coherence in terms organization, incorrect word or idiom and word usage in terms vocabulary and the use of correct word choice, poor sentence structures and poor paragraphing in terms of language use, use of first-person pronoun in terms of formality and objectivity, and lack of citations and improper way of citations in terms of referencing. Notably, the overall quality of the academic essay of students reflected a high level of difficulty in grammar, content, organization, vocabulary or word choice, language use, formality, and objectivity, referencing and academic writing as a whole.

Discussions

The respondents experienced a high level of difficulty in essay writing. In terms of content or ideas of the respondents, some of them were aware of the topic but few of them cannot cope with the topic. In terms of the organization in essay writing, it was observed that most of them were poor in paragraphing and can be described as having a high level of difficulty in writing. In terms of vocabulary, most of the respondents were using incorrect word choice, incorrect spelling and there was a high level of difficulty in writing. In the language use of the respondents/participants, there were major problems with structures even the simple ones.