Self-Reported Writing Problems and the Actual Writing Difficulties of Selected First Year

Civil Engineering Students

April E. Leano
Rosa Wanda R. Motomal
Tomasa F. Quinones
e-mail address: april.leano@gmail.com

Abstract

The continuous decline in the English proficiency of Filipino learners is one of the
major concerns of the Philippine educational system. This study was undertaken to
bridge the gap between the selected first year Civil Engineering students’ self-reported
writing problems and difficulties and the raters’ analysis of their discourse. The data
are gathered through expository essays written by the participants. These have been
rated by the researchers independently at first and convened to deliberate on the data
for a more reliable analysis. The results showed that most of the participants’ self-
assessed difficulty in writing are their word choice or vocabulary. The participants
were able to identify the following as their common mistakes in writing 1) use of
vocabulary, 2) spelling, 3) preposition, 4) punctuation marks, 5) subject-verb
agreement, and 6) tenses of verbs. The raters upon checking the written output of the
participants agreed on the participants’ self-assessed mistakes, thus, there is a perfect
agreement of the self-reported writing problems and the actual writing difficulties of
the selected first year civil engineering students.

In a world where English is the language for business communications, proficiency in it is a must.
The need for professionals to become globally competitive requires proficiency with the English
language in oral or written communications. Studies show that effective communication is very
important in any career since it is needed by students and professionals to survive in their chosen
fields. In the tertiary level, students are required to take English courses to prepare them for the
demands of the professional world. Furthermore, when a professional has good English
communication skills, it would be easier for him/her to get a better job, a higher salary and a lot
more opportunities for career advancement (Monis & Rodrigues, 2011).

The common attitude of college students is to focus more on their major subjects which oftentimes
results to neglecting their minor subjects. This is because they think that the lessons in their general
courses, especially on English subjects, are not necessary in their chosen fields. They believe that
communication skills just come quite naturally and do not need further training. According to
Indira and Meeknakshisundaram (2010), even if "English is the medium of instruction in the field
of professional education, language proficiency is not a criterion selection". This is also true in
engineering courses. Engineering students are "assessed only by their knowledge of basic
sciences" since their subjects in Engineering involves the study of the different applied sciences.
It also results to having difficulties in using “correct grammar, punctuation, sentence structure,
appropriate vocabulary, and appropriate formality in written communication”. Furthermore,
students with low English proficiency are known to have low self-esteem and would therefore fear
to perform in groups or in public (Paul & Sinha, 2010).

According to Monis and Rodrigues (2011), “Careers in any area of business or commerce, or
within the government, or in Science and Technology require fluency in English”. This is the
reason why intrinsic trainings for English language proficiency are given to students in their
undergraduate courses to prepare them in the demands of English proficiency in the corporate
world. However, in a study by Orlova and Zeidman (2010), they noticed that the EFL skills and
competencies of engineering students are relatively low resulting to the deficiency of their writing
skills. One of the reasons for this dilemma is that engineering students at present do not give much
importance to the English language because they are focusing more on their major subjects such
as General Physics, Solid Mechanics, Structural Designs, Water Resources Engineering, etc. In
addition, since Engineering is a technical course, they do not give much importance on enhancing
their communicative proficiency; instead, they focus more on enhancing their technical skills. That
is why, when they are tasked to report about a certain topic in their field of specialization, it seems
that their ideas are good but they find it difficult to express their ideas especially in the English
language. Furthermore, when a reader takes a closer look on an engineering students’ written
output, it would be observed that they write as how they say their ideas in person. Thus, the
difference between a formal and an informal discourse may not be observed.

The Cognitive Process Model of the Composing Process by Flower and Hayes (1981) discusses
the step-by-step procedure in writing. This process is characterized as “three, non-reversible linear
stages, namely; pre-writing, writing, and revision. Among these stages, the most difficult stage in
the writing process is the pre-writing stage. On this stage, the student will not only think on what
to write but he also need to consider the following: purpose, audience, and gathering information
(Campbell, 1995). Thus, when a student has already passed this stage, the succeeding stages will
be easier. The said process was found to be the most effective in “aiding the actual practice of
writing” (Gracey, n.d.) since it is easier for the learner to monitor himself in the writing process.
According to Venkatesh (2003, in Mojica 2010), “learners’ monitoring proficiencies improve as
instruction progresses”. The students can use the model to guide them in composing a good writing
material and monitor themselves to be able to enhance their writing skills further.

Diaz-Rico and Weed (1995) discussed Krashen’s Monitor Model as a “theory of second language
acquisition that provides a framework for understanding the process by which adults learn a second
language”. Krashen has five hypotheses which mainly focus on language acquisition. One of these
hypotheses that can be used in writing is the Monitor hypothesis which “postulates a device for
attaining accuracy”. The relationship between acquisition and learning actually has a positive
effect in writing. According to Krashen (1981b, 1982 in Diaz-Rico and Weed, 1995), “acquisition
initiates an utterance and is responsible for fluency” while “monitor is an error-detecting
mechanism”. These secure the accuracy that may help the learner make corrections and enhance
his/her English communication skills. It simply implies that when the learner has already
developed accuracy in the language used, he can already monitor the correctness of writing through
self-monitoring.

Despite these studies about why engineers have difficulties in language proficiency, there is a gap
in the solution to such problems. This study will bridge the gap between the selected first year
Civil Engineering students’ self-reported writing problems and difficulties and the raters’ analysis
of their discourse. In line with this, the study aims to answer the following questions:

1. What are sampled engineering students’ self-reported actual difficulties?

2. What are sampled engineering students’ self-reported actual difficulties as identified by the
teacher raters?
3. Is there an agreement between the students’ self-assessment and the raters’ evaluation of
the students’ written output?
4. What activities/strategies would the sampled Civil Engineering students of the University
of Makati suggested to enhance their self-reported difficulties?

METHODOLOGY

Setting

The University of Makati (UMak) is a local government unit (LGU) fully-funded public university
that serves the children of less privileged citizens of the city so they can actively participate in and
competitively partake of the City's economic progress. UMak envisions molding Makati youths
into productive citizens and IT-enabled professionals who are exposed to the cutting edge of
technology in their areas of specialization and allows their graduates to compete for high paying
job opportunities in its business and industries. (UMak's Student Handbook)

Participants

The researchers surveyed 22 first year civil engineering students enrolled in the University of
Makati. These students are currently enrolled in English 1 and have already taken the pre-requisite
courses in English during their senior high school.

Table 1
Participants’ Profile in Terms of Spoken Languages
As can be seen in Table 1, all of the participants surveyed have Filipino as their first language, and
a little less than 70% of the participants regarded English as their second language. Aside from
English, no other foreign language is regarded as their first or second language. However, among
the regional dialects listed on the survey, a little less than 20% of the participants regarded Visayan
as the most used in written and spoken communication followed by Ilocano with almost 10% and
lastly, Ilonggo with almost 5%. The place of residence and the ancestral province are probably
factors affecting the languages spoken by participants.

Instruments

A researcher-made questionnaire consisting of three parts was used as instrument for the study;
(1) a personal information sheet including the students’ spoken language, (2) a writing task which
will require them to rate their writing skills and to create an expository essay with at least 500
words explaining their writing difficulties – with examples and possible reasons for such
difficulties, and (3) an enumeration of the ways on how they think their difficulties could be
overcome.

The writing task was used as the corpora analyzed by the researchers. This instrument is a more
reliable basis in analyzing the self-reported problems and difficulties that the participants are
experiencing in writing using a second language (L2) since it could allow a more detailed study in
the features of discourse. This could provide analysis on both the grammatical category of the
discourse and its rhetorical principles.

Data Collection

The participants were tasked to answer the survey asking for their L1 and L2. Then a writing
prompt was given to the students for the written output needed for the study. They were instructed
to rate their writing skills and to create an expository essay with at least 500 words in a one whole
sheet of paper, explaining their writing difficulties – with examples and possible reasons for such.
The sample difficulties adapted from Mojica (2010) such as “word choice or vocabulary,
articles/determiners, use of the plural/singular forms of nouns, spelling, prepositions, punctuation
marks, subject and verb agreement and verb tense” were presented and explained to the
participants during the pre-writing stage. The rubric below is also based from Mojica’s (2010)
rating scale in her study, which is also used to rate this study’s participants’ written output in Part
II:

0 = Can’t write anything intelligible (nothing can be understood)

1 = Writing is poor (very little can be understood or considered clear)
2 = Writing is fair (less than one-half of the paragraphs can be understood or considered
clear)
3 = Writing is on the average (half of the whole paragraph can be understood or considered
clear)
4 = Writing is good (more than half of the paragraph can be understood or considered clear)
5 = Writing is very good (all or almost all sentences can be understood or considered clear)

Afterwards, the participants were instructed to list down the ways on how they think they will be
able to overcome their self-reported difficulties written on their written output.

Inter-rating

The researchers are the ones who rated the participants’ essays. They are faculty members from
the Department of English specializing in Linguistics, Grammatical Structure, and Writing. All of
them have been teaching English subjects for more than 10 years. They rated the students’ papers
independently at first; then convened to decide what rating should be given to each paper. This is
necessary to justify the rating that each rater gave each participants since the latter’s written output
were analyzed both grammatically and rhetorically.

There could be potential sources of inconsistency in the coding of the corpora collected; hence,
the need for inter-rating. According to Keyton, J., King, T., Mabachi, N., Manning, J., Leonard,
L., and Schill, D. (2004), “inter-rater reliability is the extent to which the way information being
collected is being collected in a consistent manner”. In this regard, in case one inter-rater misses
an important detail, this could be seen by the other inter-raters which provides more confidence in
the coding and rating processes given to each written output.
Data Analysis

The self-assessed writing problems and difficulties in the written outputs collected were
categorized as “word choice or vocabulary, articles/determiners, use of the plural/singular forms
of nouns, spelling, prepositions, punctuation marks, subject and verb agreement and verb tense”
(Mojica, 2010). These were presented thru frequency count (f) and percentage (%). On the other
hand, the raters coded and categorized the writing deficiencies as they appeared in the corpora.
 RESULTS

Students’ Self-reported Writing Difficulties

Table 2 illustrates the summary of the self-reported writing difficulties of the participants. It can
be observed that the participants believe that vocabulary and subject-verb agreement as their two
topmost writing difficulties. These difficulties are rated with a little more than 60% for the former
and more than 50% for the latter.

Table 2
Engineering Students’ Self-Assessment in Writing

Categories (f) %

Word Choice / Vocabulary 14 63

Articles / Determiners - -
Form Of Nouns (Plural/Singular) - -
Spelling 7 32
Prepositions 4 18
Punctuation Marks 2 9
Subject-Verb Agreement 12 55
Verb Tense 11 50

Spelling, prepositions, and punctuation marks are the three writing difficulties that show low
results. The participants focused on vocabulary and subject- verb agreement while the raters
noticed other writing difficulties that are present in their writing task such as coherence,
consistency in the use of pronoun, and redundancy of words used. Aside from the writing
deficiencies that were observed by the raters, the participants also added establishing concision,
cohesion and coherence, and use of APA as parts of their self-reported writing difficulties.

The participants considered punctuation marks as the least self-reported writing difficulty with less
than 10%. The results of this study is similar to that of Chen (2002, in Mojica, 2010) where 60.7%
of the freshmen and sophomore students reported difficulty in vocabulary, which ranked first,
while half of the participants reported grammar. However, this study gathered different results
from that of Gustilo’s (2009) study where the use of proper punctuation marks is considered as the
top most writing difficulty of the students. Gustilo (2009) hypothesized two probable reasons for
this difficulty i.e., “(1) the students probably failed to grasp the rules of punctuation marks, and
(2) the carelessness in the use of punctuation marks while writing.” On the other hand, the use of
vocabulary and word choice ranked first in this study, which ranked second in the study performed
by Gustilo (2009) where it has been observed that almost 15% is accounted. According to Gustilo
(2009), “This category can be said to be the most troubling of all grammatical/syntactic error types
because the students could not find appropriate words to match their intended ideas, which may
be attributed to their limited vocabulary resources.”

Below are sample sentences that show the participants’ writing difficulties based on the raters’
assessment:

A. Vocabulary/ Word Choice:

E20: … to express your taught in writing. [thought]
E3: … the correct chose of words.. [choice]
E9: … is quietly wrong [quite]

B. Articles and Determiners:

E4: … research to the other books
E7: I am not reading an English books
E9: As a students…

C. Use of singular/ plural form of nouns:

E12: …having a writing difficulties
E16: The reason in my difficulty [difficulties]
E18: gave an exercises [exercise]

D. Spelling:
E17: good or bad in writting [writing]
E18: in my carer… [career]
E16: Professors thought me [taught]

E. Prepositions:
E22: …think of a good introduction in my paragraph. [for]
E21: the process are which you think… [in]
E9: especially on writing… [in]

F. Punctuations:
E2: a complete thought, It does not….
E11: and having. A second thoughts. Having those…

G. Subject Verb Agreement

E1: English subjects helps us…
E12: I’ll answering questions that needs to explain well…
E18: When a teacher or professor tolds me to….

H. Tense:
E2: words which I can’t defined… [define]
 E4: I cannot usually distinguished… [distinguish]
E10: Is to expressed ideas… [express]

One good thing is that students were able to identify and admit the possible causes of those
difficulties such as: poor command of the language, failure to practice and use the language in
everyday conversations and lastly lack of confidence in using the language. The latter seems to be
the most prevalent reason, as revealed in the examples below:

E 17: I avoided because of the fear of being embarrassed.

E 15: the possible reasons for this difficulties are having low confident in self…

These awareness together with “instrumental motivation” and “integrative motivation” (Yule
2006) can motivate the participants to complete a graduation requirement, to read articles and
books written in the language and to communicate efficiently using the second language.

Comparison of Assessments Between the Participants and Raters

The table below presents the agreement between the Engineering students’ self-assessment and
the raters’ assessment that is categorized into (1) perfect agreement, which means both raters gave
the same evaluations; (2) partial agreement, which means there is a difference of 1 between the
ratings; and (3) no agreement, which means there are two or more differences between the ratings.

Table 3
Agreement between Engineering Students’ Self-Assessment and Raters’ Assessment

Perfect Agreement Partial Agreement No Agreement

(F) % (F) % (F) %

16 73 2 9 4 18

The data shows that a perfect agreement of 73% between the raters and the Engineering students
was observed. This means that Engineering students were able to define their common mistakes
when writing such as, the use of vocabulary, spelling, prepositions, punctuation marks, subject-
verb agreement, and the tenses of verbs. The raters then checked the students’ written output and
have agreed upon the respondents’ self-assessed mistakes, thus a perfect agreement. There were
also some observations such as a problem in coherence and redundancy of words, to name a few.
On the other hand, the respondents and the raters partially concurred on the respondents’ use of
articles / determiners, and form of nouns. The raters observed that the respondents have the
tendency to overlook their use of determiners/articles
 E4: …research to the other books
E7: I am not reading an English books
E9: As a students…
and form of nouns in their written output.
E16: The reason in my difficulty [difficulties]
E18: gave an exercises [exercise]

The articles a, and, and the are the most commonly altered articles in the Engineering class’ output.
Also, it was observed that the respondents had a strong difficulty with using the correct noun forms
(singular or plural). There was, however, a No Agreement relationship between the raters and the
Engineering students as observed.

Generally, this somehow supports Gressang’s (2010) claim that English learners have complete
semantic representations for articles but experiences difficulty on choosing the right lexical form
when writing due to ‘stress on mental processing or phonological limitations.’ This means that in
the thinking process, students know what they want to write, but due to some stress factors (i.e.
vocabulary limitations, difficulty in understanding sentence construction rules), they become
perplexed in the writing process.

Activities/Strategies Suggested by the Participants

The participants acknowledged that they could overcome writing problems by constantly using the
English language in their everyday lives. One of them said that self-confidence is one factor that
can help them speak L2. Probably because it is difficult to use the English language if one is afraid
to be embarrassed when using it in conversations. Furthermore, most of them believe that the need
to read and to be familiarized with the English language can aid them to better comprehension and
can acquaint them to more vocabularies. A great majority of the participants believe that if they
seriously practice use of the language, they can eventually get comfortable using the language in
everyday conversations. Moreover, reading books and articles, writing essays in English,
mastering the grammar rules, being given guidance and encouragements, memorizing words from
the dictionary, watching movies and listening to conversations in English, are some of the tasks
believed to be essential in mastering the English language. As can be observed, the participants
still need to engage themselves to the conventional way of learning the English language.
However, to motivate them further, the use of technologically-mediated instructional materials are
also advisable since the participants are into applied sciences. They will appreciate the English
lessons more if the teacher knows how to incline their lessons and strategies with science. This
makes the students become more interested in language learning since the target language is
incorporated with their field of expertise.

CONCLUSION

Proficiency in the use of the English language is very important. Generally, engineering students
are more concerned about learning Mathematics and Science instead of English. Not investing
time and effort to develop good communication skills may inhibit an engineering student to get a
good paying job. In the tertiary level, students are required to take English courses to prepare them
for the demands of the professional world. If the students are proficient in the use of the English
language, they have more opportunities for career advancement.

The participants were able to identify the following as their common mistakes in writing 1) use of
vocabulary, 2) spelling, 3) preposition, 4) punctuation marks, 5) subject-verb agreement, and 6)
tenses of verbs. The raters upon checking the written output of the participants agreed on the
participants’ self-assessed mistakes, thus, there is a perfect agreement. The participants
acknowledged that they have problems with their English proficiency specifically when it comes
to writing. However, they are very much open to the ideas that they could still improve their use
of the language.

Constantly using the language in their everyday lives could help students improve their
proficiency. Having self-confidence is another factor that can help a student speaks his L2.
Probably because it is difficult to use the English language if one is afraid to be embarrassed when
using it in conversations. When it comes to improving their writing skills, the need to read more
and to be more familiar with the English language can improve the students’ comprehension level
and furthermore help increase their vocabulary. Reading books and articles in English, writing in
English, mastering the grammar rules, being given the necessary guidance and encouragements,
memorizing words from the dictionary, watching movies and listening to conversations in English,
are some of the tasks believed to be essential in mastering the English language. These are just
some of the conventional ways of learning the English language that a student has to engage
himself with in order for him to master the use of it.

To motivate the students further in enhancing their writing skills, the use of technologically
mediated instructional materials is also advisable. The students will appreciate the English lessons
more if they know how to connect their lessons with their chosen fields. This makes the students
become more interested in writing since the target language is incorporated with their field of
expertise.

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