Problems Faced by Student Writers

Scardamalia and Bereiter (1986) have identified five aspects of composing

an essay that can be a challenge for students and these are listed as (a)

generating ideas, (b) developing and organizing the essay, (c) setting goals

and drawing out to execute higher order writing skills, (d) incorporating

the mechanical aspects of writing, and (e) revising and editing the writing

The first aspect, that is generating ideas for an essay is part of the pre-

writing stage, which usually involves brainstorming where writers take

time to ponder over their topic, consider their audience, and generate ideas

through methods such as listing, clustering or free writing. The success of

the writing, to a large extent, depends on a student's ability to plan before

writing during this pre-writing stage. Unfortunately, many students do not

realise the value of planning before writing; instead, they tend to write

with minimum or no planning just as soon as they get their assignments.

Such a practice does not promote planning nor goal setting (Chalk, Hagan-

Burke, & Burke, 2005), which is essential for self-regulation in writing.

These less successful writers tend to resort to a technique known as

knowledge telling where they write whatever comes to their mind

(Graham, 1990).

Closely connected to the first aspect, which is generating ideas or

planning, is the second aspect that is developing and organizing the essay.

Less successful writers tend to produce writing which is poorly organised

with a few inadequately developed ideas (Graham, 1990). This is probably

due to their poor utilisation of the strategies for information retrieval and

their perception of writing assignments as question-and-answer tasks

(Chalk, Hagan-Burke, & Burke, 2005; Graham, 1990). Owing to this

notion, there is little effort at evaluating or revising the information used

with respect to their ‘rhetorical goals’ as these writers tend to employ little

metacognition and adopt a ‘retrieve and write’ approach to writing where

they write from memory with hardly any self-regulation (MacArthur &

students with LD found that students writing opinion essays tend to

compose essays with elements missing and end their essays without a

conclusion or summation, thinking that they have ‘answered’ the question

by merely stating a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with a few reasons. Thus, it was found

that weaker or learning disabled writers wrote shorter essays which lacked

quality and coherence compared to their peers who were better or not

disabled (Graham , 2006a; Graham, Schwartz, & MacArthur, 1993).

Flower and Hayes (1980) discovered that experienced writers tend to

formulate a set of goals as well as plans at the outset of a writing task to

direct them in executing higher-level writing skills in the writing process.

These goals and plans are then evaluated and redefined as they proceed

with their writing. In fact, skilled writers tend to orchestrate a wide range

of ‘strategies for generating, organizing, evaluating, and reformulating

what they plan to do and say,’ while keeping their audience and purpose in

mind (Sexton, Harris, & Graham, 1998, p. 296). The goals and plans that

they have set earlier serve as a point of reference and give them a focus or

direction in their writing.

However, these complex aspects of writing, especially planning,

composing, evaluating, and revising are difficult even for expert writers

(Zimmerman & Risemberg, 1997) what more when it concerns ESL

students. According to Scardamalia and Bereiter (1986), many students do

not know how to revise skillfully as their attempts at revision are limited to

mechanical and word-level changes. Sommers (1980, cited in Graham,

viewed revision to involve hunting for errors, and substituting or deleting

words. This perception of revision, therefore, affects their goal setting for

revision as it may focus on changes related to the form of text rather than

those related to substance (Graham, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1995). ESL

writers have to contend with higher-level writing skills, which have also

been noted as an area of difficulty for students with LD (Graham, Harris,

MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1991). Writing is viewed as a problem-solving

task that involves setting goals for writing as well as identifying the means

of achieving them. These goals are then assessed during and after the

writing process to determine whether a student needs to redefine the goals

or continue with the writing process (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1986).

In the ESL context, content course lecturers at institutions of higher

learning have expressed concern over the lack of writing competency

among learners as they pursue advanced level courses at these institutions

(Shahrina Md Nordin & Norhisham bt Mohammad, 2006). Students have

been found to be unable to express themselves clearly nor provide

convincing arguments to indicate their understanding of their content

subjects (Chandrasegaran, 1991). Numerous factors have been identified

as variables contributing to this low proficiency in English among most

Malaysian ESL learners, which ultimately affects their ability to write.

According to a study involving lower secondary Malaysian ESL students,

these contributing factors are lack of exposure to the English language as

well as reluctance to use the language, negative attitude towards the

lack of competent English language teachers (Fauziah Hassan & Nita

Fauzee Selamat, 2002) These factors, some of which are interrelated,

continue to have an impact on students as they move on to a higher level

of education. Not only does the English proficiency of the students remain

low but it also prevents them from becoming autonomous learners.

In a study comparing students from the Diploma Programme and the

Matriculation students in a Malaysian institution of higher learning, it was

found that the diploma students acquired better writing skills than the

matriculation students. The diploma students performed better in all the

five writing components, that is content, vocabulary, organization,

language use and mechanics. This difference in performance was

attributed to exposure to the English language where the Diploma students

had all their subjects taught in English Language. This indicated that the

Matriculation students were slightly less proficient in their writing

performance due to lack of language use. Writing may be hard and

demanding but frequent exposure to reading and writing will help improve

writing performance (Yah Awg Nik, Hamzah, & Rafidee bin Hasbollah,

2010). This is necessary, especially in the case of ESL learners.

Another problem encountered while writing is that non-native speakers

(NNS) tend to think about all the rules they need to apply and in so doing

they tend to make mistakes or commit errors. It thus becomes apparent that

although NNS know how to write a ‘summary’ or do an ‘analysis’ in

another language whether it is Malay, Mandarin or even Spanish, this does

cited in Norhakimah Khaiessa Binti Ahmad, 2007).