A study into English essay writing skills of the 2nd-year English-majored students at Ha Long University: Reality and solutions

Abstract

Writing English essays is a hard and vital skill for English major students to accomplish the program outcome standards at Ha Long university. This study aimed to investigate the difficulties in writing essays encountered by the second-year English major students as well as the frequencies and techniques these students applied to write essays. A set of questionnaires were distributed to 70 of these students. The findings showed that the problems in order from the most to least students facing are coherence and cohesion (72%), vocabulary and grammar (69%), paraphrasing (66%), using the English language in their own tone (45%), and brainstorm ideas for the writing (31%). Although all students have applied suitable writing techniques, most of them did not practice regularly outside the classroom. The author also based on these findings to propose three activities as solutions and carried out an experiment on them. The subjects of the research were 25 fourth-semester English major students. The experimental result proved that teaching writing lessons following “the process wheel”, giving students extensive reading tasks, and assigning writing homework are effective measures to improve students’ essay writing skills.