Kakayahang Diskurso ng mga Mag-aaral sa Kolehiyo sa Pagsulat ng Komposisyon

This study revealed how college students use discourse competence in their composition writing. Descriptive method of research was used in this study along with Stratified random sampling. From the population of 2,847 students who wrote compositions, 142 or 5% of them were taken as sample. The instruments
used included composition writing and interview schedule instrument. Based from the analysis of their written output, the students used various discourse competence in expressing their ideas and thoughts which included the following: use of reference, use of conjunction, repetition of terms, enumeration, use of ellipsis, parallelism, collocation and synonyms. The discourse competence used by students in their composition writings were validated through group interview. According to the respondents, they use discourse competence because they want to avoid using the same word in a sentence or paragraph, they lack vocabulary, they do not want to have tedious long sentences and due to the influence of texting. Based from the results of the study, a learning plan was developed to be used in teaching writing. The use of discourse competence in composition writing is due to the limited Filipino vocabulary of the students. Their usual way of writing is influenced by modern technology and the social media. There is a need to increase the amount of time in teaching writing so that students will fully understand how to write properly. Considerable time is needed for them to be able to write clear and concise compositions to satisfy the requirements of the Basic Education Curriculum of the Department of Education. Varied writing exercises are also given to further develop and enhance their writing skills.

Keywords –Discourse competence, written communication, writing composition