The Self-Assessment of the Students on English Paragraph Writing Competencies and Opinions towards Outline Technique

Abstract

          The purposes of this mixed-method study were 1) to compare students’ self-assessment towards paragraph writing competencies before and after learning outline technique, 2) to find out students’ competencies focusing on paragraph writing aspects which were most and least developed, and 3) to investigate students’ opinions towards the importance of the outline technique, problems, and solutions when using the technique. Using a purposive sampling technique, the samples of the study were 61 English major students from a public university. The research instruments were the 5-point Likert scale questionnaires relating to the students’ self-assessment on paragraph writing competencies before and after learning the outline technique and the open-ended questionnaire relating to the importance of the outline technique, problems, and solutions while using such technique. Concerning the quantitative data analysis and report, descriptive statistics that included mean scores and standard deviation were applied. Regarding the qualitative data analysis and report, content analysis and description were used. The findings showed that 1) after learning the outlining technique, the mean scores of the students’ self-assessment on paragraph writing competencies was higher than that before learning, 2) the competencies relating to paragraph writing aspects being most developed involved using connectors, controlling ideas, and a unified paragraph whereas the competencies being least developed were paragraph cohesion, using writing mechanics, capitalization and punctuation, and using sentence structures and grammar, and 3) the students saw the importance of the outline technique for writing a paragraph but still had some problems on using sentence structures, grammar, and vocabulary. Due to these problems, additional learning and reviewing on English sentence structures and grammar, asking other classmates for opinions, and using dictionaries were used as solutions.