- 會議論文
Thai University Students' Problems in Writing Opinion Essays
摘要
Writing essays is one mode of writing tasks usually used as writing activities for EFL students due to its benefits to develop students' critical and logical ideas. To produce a good opinion essay relies on several elements, two of which are content development and organization. However, many EFL students still encounter problems to develop ideas and arrange their information whenever they write opinion essays. This study therefore aimed to investigate the types of content and organization problems that students encountered when writing opinion essays. Also when the given topics were different, the researchers wanted to find out whether the problems between the two were similar or different, and the reasons behind them. Two sets of 30 opinion essays-each set with a different topic-written by 30 Thai undergraduate students were collected and analysed with qualitative content analysis methods. The results show that opinion essay problems are different if the given topics are different. Students who were not familiar with the given topic had more problems in terms of content development such as problems in writing thesis statements. Meanwhile students seemed to have problems in arranging information when they had little or no experience in writing opinion essays; that is, students faced this kind of problem when writing the first topic more than the second.