EFL Students’ Perception and Practices of Paragraph Writing and the Challenges they face: Grade 8 Students of BeroMuri Higher Primary School in Focus

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate Grade 8 EFL students’ perception and practices of paragraph writing and the challenges they face during their practical activities of paragraph writing. In order to guide overall process, descriptive survey research design and mixed method of data analysis procedures were employed. A total of 45 grade 8 EFL students of BeroMuri higher primary school using comprehensive sampling and two purposively selected EFL teachers of the school were participants of the study respectively. In order to achieve the objectives, the study employed three data gathering tools namely questionnaires, interview and observation. Both open-ended and close-ended questionnaires were used to find out data about students’ perception, practices and challenges of paragraph writing. Furthermore, English language teachers were interviewed to substantiate the data collected via questionnaire about the three main study variables such as students’ perception, practices and challenges in writing paragraphs. The major findings of the research were: EFL teachers were rarely gave practical tasks on paragraph writing, and that was insufficient as much as required, students perceive that practical paragraph writing tasks were difficult and unachievable, some paragraph writing contents in textbook were beyond the students’ maturity level, the contents of student textbooks were too vast and teachers were hurry to cover them, total absence of paragraph writing activities in book 2 of grade 8 students’ textbook were identified. Therefore, forwarded recommendations based on findings of study were: the students should actively participate and practice paragraph writing tasks both in classroom and out of the classroom, EFL teachers should pay more attention for paragraph writing lessons and give more practical paragraph writing tasks and provide corrective feedback appropriately. They should alsofacilitate students’ learning with more practical supplementary materials. Lastly, Curriculum developers and syllabus designers should come up with revised contents and better strategies to address the difficulties students were being faced in grade 8 paragraph writing lessons.