Quality Analysis of English Writing Skills Competency among Grade Four Students

Abstract

Writing is one of the most important strands of the English curriculum generally a pre-conceived difficulty even among the language teachers in Bhutan. Although no action research (AR) has been done to validate this topic with writing difficulties in the research school, this AR seeks to find out particularly the standard of English of grade four children and to analyze the factors affecting quality writing. Writing is considered the most important skill for language production. However, students face many challenges in quality writing due to the consideration of language difficulty. Therefore, this AR analyzes the writing quality of grade four children through error analysis (EA) and to study effective methods to improve quality writing. For this purpose, two sections comprising of 30 students each from four sections were chosen for analyzing the quality writing through EA. Writing samples were collected from 60 students to investigate the major problems in their writing through a diagnostic test. After the analysis of EA, the intervention program was designed with different strategies to improve quality writing. Furthermore, the target groups were evaluated on intervention effectiveness through the post-test. The findings exhibited that the major problems among grade four students were appropriate command over the use of tenses, word order, vocabulary, spellings, capitalization, and lack of ideas in the writing process. Besides, the study analyzed the factors affecting quality writing through focus group discussions and free form questionnaire provided to language teachers as the informants.