Diving into Learner Difficulties in Effective Essay Paragraph Development

Writing skill as one of the language skills that need to be improved and practiced. Through writing, the students can express their ideas and thoughts into written form (Pentury, 2020). However, in the actual classroom set up, we encountered learners who can hardly come up an effective paragraph development in essay writing. This study sought to determine the writing difficulties of the Grade 10 learners in a public high school in the Philippine regarding to effective essay paragraph development. The respondents were the 118-sample size taken out to the 168 total population. Calculator.Net was used in getting the sample size. This paper is in quantitative research approach. In determining the said goal, researchers used an adopted survey questionnaire about Academic Writing Difficulties by University EFL Learners. The said survey questionnaire was composed of 15 questions about the writing difficulties and was conducted during English time. The statistical tools used to determine the writing difficulties of the respondents were mean and standard deviation. The mean of each item was ranked using the five-point Likert scale adopted on the same study. Findings revealed that out of 15 questions, the top five writing difficulties ranked consecutively were “difficulty in coming up with good thesis statements”, “difficulty in developing thesis statements, “difficulty in determining whether a quotation is required or not”, “difficulty in choosing an appropriate academic word”, and “difficulty in writing coherent paragraphs”. Since experts on the field, English teachers have this advantageous role in addressing these challenges encountered by English language learners through the provision of sufficient writing practices and should allocate enough time for learners to write, since it is essential for the formation of ideas.