An Evaluation of First Year Students of English’ Learning of the Basics Of Paragraph Writing From a Socio-cultural Perspective

Abstract

The present study gauged from the perspective of socio-cultural theory, the effectiveness of the first year writing course offered at the department of English in Mohammed Seddik Ben yahia University in fostering students‟ s paragraph writing skills .In order to achieve the aims of this evaluation, a students‟ questionnaire was designed and implemented to a sample of a group of thirty five first year students chosen on the basis of convenience. Moreover, an interview was designed and administered to the writing teacher of the same group so as to verify students „answers. The results revealed that the writing course currently in use suffers from five major weaknesses at least: the lack of sufficient time for writing practice, the lack of adequate teacher‟s and peer feedback, the lack of sufficient opportunities for cooperative learning, and failure in the development of writing as a habit. One of these findings at least, has been confirmed by the results generated by the teachers „interview: feedback is not yielding the expected outcomes.