An Investigation into Aspects of Improvement of Basic Paragraph Writing Skills

Abstract

This paper describes a classroom-based study designed to investigate the aspects of improvement in students’ English language writing abilities from five Paragraph Writing Skill Labs, organized in 2015. The labs were specially designed to train students to produce a well-organized paragraph based on the framework of Oshima and Hogue (1988, 1991), i.e. introduction by the topic sentence, supporting details and the conclusion as well as other basics of English writing such as accuracy and coherence. The two research questions were: 1) How did the students in the Paragraph Writing Skill Labs write their paragraphs (based on Oshima and Hogue’s Framework)?; and 2) In what areas of composing did students show signs of writing improvement? The study revealed that the aspects that could be improved more easily than the grammar aspect (Rank 7) were those of paragraph structure (topic sentence, body and conclusion), which alternately ranked 1, 2 and 3 in the sample groups of participants out of the seven aspects measured by the rubric used. Based on the results, teachers of writing are therefore recommended to spend a significant portion of class time training students in paragraph organization, while encouraging students to review and revise their own grammatical errors.