Writing Difficulties and Quality of Academic Essays of Senior High School Students

This descriptive-qualitative research determined and analyzed the difficulties of Senior High School students in writing academic essays and the overall quality of the academic essays of the students. Further, it compared the quality of the academic essays of the students from public and private schools. Using the random sampling technique, the academic essays of the 227 Grade 11 Senior High School students in the Schools Division of Laoag City were selected and analyzed for the purpose of the study. To gather the needed data, the study used a researcher-made checklist patterned after the criteria set by Jacobs (1981) in evaluating academic essays and the Standardized Rubric in Evaluating Academic Essay of Jacobs (1981) enriched by Valdez (2016). Findings show that the students have difficulties in writing academic essays such as lack of variety of ideas in terms of content and ideas, lack of connectives in terms organization, incorrect word or idiom and word usage in terms vocabulary and word choice, poor sentence structures in terms of language use, use of first person pronoun in terms of formality and objectivity, and lack of citations in terms of referencing. Notably, the overall quality of the students’ academic essays ranges from poor to fair. Further, the quality of the academic essays of the students from private schools is of better quality than students’ academic essays from public schools.

Keywords – academic essays, writing difficulties, quality of academic essays, senior high school students