Abstract:
English writing in our academic setting has always been recognized as a certifying skill
as students have to sit for examination and prove their competence by writing properly.
However, the common tension affects each learner and teacher that the standard of
English writing is declining as far as independent writing of students is concerned.
English has been a compulsory subject from grade 1-12 with further emphasis on
various skills at the undergraduate level that does not even guarantee any reasonable
achievement in writing for majority of the students. The current study aimed at looking at
a general standard of paragraph writing focusing on a very simple topic which is
commonly practiced in the junior secondary level. For the study, 300 sample writings
were collected from tertiary level students of 10 different institutions of the country. The
findings reveal rather a bleak picture of student writing showing serious weaknesses in
several areas from spelling mistakes as the highest number (n-573) to pronoun (n-19). In addition, sentence level mistakes also indicate a poor command of syntactic accuracy.
Therefore, from this study, word and sentence level mistakes appear to be quite
alarming underpinning innovative means of teaching to improve current state of student
writing in English at their primary and secondary level. This issue equally deserves to be
incorporated in various ELT training and pedagogic discourse so that teacher and
learner awareness can be raised for effective classroom teaching and learning.
