Abstract:
The main purpose of this study was to investigate factors affecting the practice of grade 10
students’ paragraph writing skills in English writing classroom. The study was carried out in
Miesso Secondary School with special reference to grade10. Mixed method research design was
employed to address the problem. Three English teachers and 80 students were involved in the
study. In order to achieve the objectives, the study employed three data gathering tools:
questionnaire, semi-structured interview and classroom observation. Questionnaire was used to
find out the extent to which students give attention to practice paragraph writing, find out
students’ paragraph writing problems and to assess the factors that affect their paragraph
writing skills. Semi-structured interview was employed to discover students’ paragraph writing
practices and to assess the causes of their problems. Furthermore, classroom observation was
employed to observe the practices of writing paragraph and the roles teachers and students play
during writing classes. The data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The study
identified the major paragraph writing problems students’ encounter. These are problem of
organization, unity, coherence, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and spelling.
In addition, factors that were affecting students’ paragraph writing skills were identified. These
were lack of appropriate use of paragraph writing approach, technique and strategies, students’
writing anxiety, lack of regular practice in FL writing, teachers’ ways of giving feedback, and
shortage of time to practice paragraph writing, lack of students’ topic knowledge, and lack of
adequate assessment on paragraph writing skills, students’ lack of motivation and reinforcement
and students’ poor reading background. Therefore, since paragraph writing is a skill that could
be improved through sufficient practicing, students should be given chance of practicing
paragraph writing skills to become effective writers.
