Abstract:
The main purpose of this study was to investigate factors affecting EFL students’ paragraph writing. The study was conducted in Babile wereda three secondary Schools namely Babile, Bisidimo and Wayyu secondary schools with special reference to grade10 students in focus. In order to address the problem under investigation, the three data gathering tools were employed paragraph analysis, questionnaire and interview of the teachers. Then mixed research method which contains both qualitative and quantitative method of data collection was employed. The researcher analyzed the paragraphs written by 108 students. The questionnaire was used mainly to collect data about the factors affecting students’ paragraph writing skills from 108 respondents. In addition, six English teachers of the focused schools were interviewed to triangulate the information gained from the students about the causes for EFL students’ poor paragraph writing and got data about students’ paragraph writing difficulties. All data collected from the three instruments were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The researcher identified the problems students have in paragraph writing. The problems are categorized as teacher aspect problems and students’ aspect problems. These are problem of grammar, unity, punctuation marks, poor organization and lack of identifying the topic, supporting and concluding sentences in paragraph writing. In addition, factors that were affecting students’ paragraph writing were divided into students’ related factors like, students’ writing anxiety, shortage of vocabulary and lack of practice, lack of target language exposure and teachers’ related factors such as teachers’ ways of giving feedback and motivation. Therefore, in order to eradicate these students’ paragraph writing problems, English language teachers should make students active learner and give the students different writing tasks..
