Abstract:
The study was carried out with the investigation of students‟ and teachers‟ attitude, practices
and challenges in teaching and learning paragraph writing in grade 9 and 10 in EFL context.
To attain this objective, mixed (qualitative and quantitative) research method was employed
.To gather necessary data, respectively 76 sample students and 7 English language teachers
,who have been teaching in grade 9 and 10 , were selected as participants. To select data,
stratified random sampling was used. The stratified random sampling was employed to select
the students. The data were collected through document analysis, classroom observation,
interview and questionnaire. Then, the data gathered through these tools and were organized
and analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In order to create a holistic
picture of these qualitative and quantitative data, thus the researcher integrated and carefully
discussed them all around subsequent thematic topics of study in relation to the research
questions. The study identified the major paragraph writing challenges the students
encounter. These are the problems of organization, unity, adequacy, grammar, punctuation,
capitalization and spelling. In addition, challenges that students‟ paragraph writing were
divided in to students‟ like lack of knowledge of strategies use, lack of regular practice and
teachers‟ ways of giving feedback. Therefore, paragraph writing is a skill that could be
improved through sufficient practicing, students should have been given chance of learning
and practicing features of good paragraph to effectively use them to write a paragraph.
