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

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.