Muhammad Salman
Islamia College Peshawar
Writing is one of the important skills among speaking, reading and listening skills in English. As we all know that English is an international and second language of most of the countries. It is used as Lingua Franca among people from different cultures and different social background. It is far the most widely used language around the world. Writing in English is uttermost common effort these days. Students are supposed to write their research, thesis, assignment and other stuff in English. When they sit to write something, then they come to know that how much the English writing is difficult and tough.
Challenges
Every student is special and unique in their own way. So it depends on the students where they are facing challenges and problems while writing and how these challenges pull back them to produce splendid piece of writing.
Following are some of the common challenges faced by students while writing.
Firstly, students have lack of exposure to books and reading materials. Mostly Pakistani students rely on their academic books solely. Hardly will be anyone who studies extra books in order to get more information and insight. It is fact that if someone wants to improve and enhance his/her writing skills, then he/she should read and read books and if somebody wants to enhance his speaking skills then he ought to improve his listening skills. Lack of extensive reading will not help the students to write good sentences or paragraphs. It is because writing and reading are interrelated. The brain neuron will be in good contact if they read more and connecting ideas with their prior knowledge. If students are not reading books and other reading materials, they are going to have a lack of good ideas and vocabulary to write.
• Secondly, as a result of not reading and lack of exposure to books, students will not have a plenty of good vocabulary. The lack of vocabulary caused the students to face challenges in acquiring writing skills because the vocabulary and grammar are the basic and fundamental elements in constructing sentences. It is need to be with everyone to have a fancy piece of writing. These both elements are the core of effective writing skills. Students mostly use spoken and written words every single day to communicate their ideas, beliefs and feeling with other around them. Good vocabulary repertoire can help students to speak or write to deliver their assignments, papers, thought and feeling effectively.
Thirdly, some students are also having issues with grammar. Grammar plays in important role in writing. It provides information that helps the readers to understand it meaning. Basically it is a structure that conveys a complete message of writer to the readers. It also explains the forms and structure of words, called morphology and how they are arranged in sentences, called syntax. If the students don’t have sufficient knowledge of grammar then he feels anxiety to write sentences with correct grammar.
Most of the students also have difficulties to write correct spelling. Having good spelling ability will lead you to positive learning of writing skills. If students are struggling with spelling, it will hold them back to move forward. But now we are living in modern technology era, nowadays spelling is not a big issue while writing something on phone or laptop. Students make mistakes in spelling because they try to spell the words according to their pronunciation and then this leads to the wrong spelling.
Lack of ideas is another challenge for students because students do not read books and extra material that is why they didn’t come up with good ideas while writing. The students also lack courage and confidence to write a good piece of writing. Some students have ability in their blood to write effectively on any topic but they lack confidence. Or sometime they didn’t get any best platform to reveal their capabilities and it remained suppressed with them.
Another big challenge is also the “readiness of students”. Students are not ready and mentally prepared to enhance their writing skills. It is very important if they really want to excel their writing skills. It will not leave your way until you learn it because you will come across it everywhere. It should also be understand that student’s background has also a major influence on their writing skills. Their Level of literary, education as well as many other factors, impact upon how well a student is able to self-learn process and retain information.
To conclude, mostly Asian countries (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka etc.) students don’t have good writing skills. It is a result of student’s unawareness. As a result of these challenges, students experience isolation and lack of belonging and unfair perceptions or underestimation of their academic abilities. Language proficiency contributes heavily to the individual’s success. If the students have no good writing skills, they will be unable to apply their research and knowledge in the context of paper beautifully. This in turn will result to poor quality papers and low grades.
It is suggested that students should be taught English well earliest at elementary standard school. As a result the students will be able to have effective writing skills so they will not feel any hesitation if someone ask them to write letter or doing their thesis, assignment once they get promoted to universities level. Writing is not only vital in order to develop their academic performance but it also contributes to their emotional development. Moreover in this competitive world, writing is one of the necessary skills to excel. Their inability to write well may affect their chances to secure job in the future. Therefore this issue needs to be tackled very effectively.
