Analysis of grade nine students’ proficiency in essay writing in private and public schools

Abstract

The present study entitled “Analysis of Grade Nine Students’ Proficiency in Essay Writing in Private and Public Schools” was an attempt to find out the essay writing proficiency of the students of private and public schools and to compare their essay writing proficiency of the students in Chitwan district. Ten students were selected purposively for the study. A single subjective question was used as the tools for data elicitation. The data were analyzed under different thematic headings like holistic analysis, essay wise tabulation of data, tabularization of essay and component wise analysis. The major finding of the study was that different students have different proficiency in writing essays. Some students did not follow the parameters of the essay. The overall essay writing proficiency of the students was found unsatisfactory. Most students wrote content, argumentations, grammar, and organization properly while only few students are found to be poor in these components. Most of the students even did not write the topic sentence (thesis statement) as well as supporting details with examples. They presented more than two ideas in one paragraph and wrote sentences out of the content. Coherence and use of cohesive devices were found very poor in their writings. The organization of ideas was found weak. Not only these but also they were found weak in language and grammar. Ambiguous words and sentences were found. Some of them even failed to meet the required length of the essay. This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chaptIer deals with the general background of language, statement of the problem, rationale of the study, research questions, significance of the study, delimitation of the study and operational definition of the key terms. The second chapter states the review of related literature and conceptual framework of the research. The third chapter deals with methodology adopted to carry out research. It consists of data, sample population, sampling procedures, tools, process of data collection and data analysis and interpretation procedures. The fourth chapter deals with the result and interpretation of the data. Chapter Five consists of the summary, conclusions and implications of the study. The final part of study consists of references and appendices.