Investigation Of Students‟ And Teachers‟ Attitudes, Practices And Challenges In Learning Teaching Paragraph Writing: The Case Of General Wako Gutu Secondary School

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.