Secondary Level Students' Proficiency on Essay Writing

Abstract

This study entitled "Secondary Level Students' Proficiency on Essay Writing" aimed to examine the writing proficiency of Grade ten students and to analyze the proficiency of the students between descriptive and argumentative essay. As a teacher, I have observed that the students particularly of community schools have many challenges in essay writing including structure, cohesiveness, coherence as well as content development. The previous studies also showed that the students encountered difficulties during free writing. So, I have chosen this topic as my research. For this Research, I used quantitative methods. The participants were selected from five secondary community schools of Dharan Sub-Metropolitan City of Sunsari District, totaling 50 students, with 10 from each sample school including 5 boys and 5 girls. The research employed random sampling procedure to collect data through a survey based approach using two essays (descriptive and argumentative) as test items. The data were analyzed in terms of holistic, item- wise, and gender- wise. The findings of the study indicated that in holistic section, the overall proficiency of grade ten students' on essay writing was found unsatisfactory. Notably, 75 percent students struggled to meet the required length of the essay writing. The writing failed in terms of organizing ideas, presenting the supporting details or evidences, presenting suitable illustration well as language and grammar. The analysis revealed the significant errors in subject- verb agreement, tense usage, spelling, prepositions and articles, punctuation, including the capitalization, commas, proper use of full stop and other punctuation marks. Similarly, in item- wise section, students' proficiency was found better in argumentative essay compared to descriptive essay. Likewise, in gender-wise analysis, the girls' proficiency was found slightly better than boys. This study consisted five chapters with topics and subtopics in each chapter. The first chapter introduces the general background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives, research questions, delimitations and operational key terms. Similarly, the second chapter deals with literature review, discussing its implications, and outlining the theoretical framework of the study. Likewise, the third chapter elaborates on the research design and methods, encompassing details about the population of the study, sample selection procedures, study area, data collection tools, techniques, procedures, and analysis of the data. The forth chapter describes the presentation and interpretation of the obtained results, while the final chapters concludes the report with summaries and implications.