STUDENTS’ LEARNING NEEDS FOR ENGLISH PARAGRAPH WRITING

Abstract

This research aims to discover students’ learning needs for English paragraph writing; a compulsory subject taught in the first semester of the school programs for English majors in a high-quality program at the English Department, School of Foreign Languages. In order to achieve the results, the authors surveyed by asking 36 first-year English majors in the high-quality program to answer a questionnaire about their learning needs for this subject. The questionnaire survey was implemented online on an application called Google forms. It could be seen from the results that although most of the respondents experienced learning how to write an English paragraph, nearly all of them encountered difficulties in learning this subject. In addition, lacking vocabulary and problems using proper sentence structures are two obstacles preventing them from writing English paragraphs smoothly. These are highlighting features that the authors and materials designers should consider when designing teaching and learning materials for them.