W 015 F

Introduction:
The Writing and Research Skills Course is one of the most essential courses of English Department of JPU, because it is a pre-requisite of students` further studies. Other courses of English Department of JPU require a lot of essay writing so students need to possess good academic writing skills by the time they apply for these courses. By showing the direction of how to write excellent essays and how to acquire academic writing skills, the Writing and Research Course is the basis of other courses of English Department of JPU. The aim of the course is to provide students with skills and information, which they can imply later. In this paper I will point at the parts of this course that influenced students` writing skills in a positive or negative way.

Methods:
To highlight the most important parts of the course I had to make an opinion survey in order to collect data. In the second and third week of April 1997 I looked for 22 students who already completed the Writing and Research Skills Course or as it was called earlier: Formal Writing Course. The aim of both courses was to help students acquire the skills of academic writing. Two of the 22 students were first year students, 12 of them were second year students and eight of them were third year students. So I asked 22 English majors of JPU about their essay writing attitudes. They were each given a questionnaire containing four questions and they had ten minutes to answer the following four questions briefly:

1) What was the most difficult for you when writing an essay? (at the beginning of the
Writing and Research Skills Course or the Formal Writing Course)
2) Which part of the course helped you to overcome this difficulty? Which part of the
course meant a cornerstone or landmark for you?
3) Which part of the course do you think should have been given more focus?
4) Do you still have difficulty when writing an essay? If yes, what is it?
After getting back the filled-out questionnaires, I prepared a table about the questions and answers in order to analyze and evaluate them. Finally, I grouped the answers into categories, summarized students` opinion, and drew a conclusion.

Results:
After analyzing the collected data I noticed they reflected very variable results. I evaluated the answers related to each question and divided students` opinion into categories. I looked at the answers given to the first question first and summarized them, then examined the answers for the other three questions, too.

The first question was: What was the most difficult for you at the beginning of the course when writing an essay? Only two kinds of responses were given to the first question. 18 of the 22 students claimed that they had hardship in organizing the introduction and the conclusion. They did not know how to start and finish the essay. Four students were confronted by difficulties when they wanted to use proper vocabulary but could not do so.

The second question was: Which part of the course helped you to overcome the difficulty? Which part of the course meant a cornerstone or landmark for you? 19 of 22 students answered that the solution to overcome the difficulty was to review other students` essays. The group writing activity also had a supporting role in that. Three of the students were of the opinion that the essay-on-tape activity was the most helpful for them to overcome their difficulties.

Essay-on-tape was one of the tasks of the Writing and Research Skills Course that students had to carry out. They were given three topics to select from and then they had to write and record an essay on tape about it. The total score of this task was ten points. This activity was effective because the students could hear their own voices and thus discover and correct stylistic, syntactic, and pronunciation mistakes, as a way of revision.

The third question was: Which part of the course do you think should have been given more focus? According to the answers given to this question, 17 of 22 students had the opinion, that more essay correction and practicing of the writing rules (topic sentences, paragraph organization, punctuation) could have been given more emphasis thus helping them to develop skills in academic essay writing. Five students commented that the word-selection and the use of well-chosen words could have been given more focus.

The fourth question was: Do you still have difficulties in writing an essay? If yes, what is it? 19 students said that they still had difficulties in essay writing. 14 of them claimed that they knew the rules in theory, but could not apply them in practice. Three students had almost the same problem: they could not write an introduction and a conclusion. Two students replied that they could not use appropriate vocabulary. Only three students reported that they had no further difficulties in essay writing after having completed the Writing and Research Skills or Formal Writing Courses.

Discussion:
I divided the answers into four categories according to the topics in which they appeared.
* introduction and conclusion
* vocabulary
* reviewing essays and group writing
* practice (topic sentences, punctuation, paragraph organization)

I) Introduction and conclusion:
18 of 22 students claimed that they could not write an introduction and a conclusion. When writing an essay, they should write the introduction and conclusion only after having finished the main text in order to write exquisite essays. Re-reading the main text can help them to write excellent sentences for the introduction and the conclusion.

II) Vocabulary:
Four students claimed that they were confronted by difficulties when they had to write an essay, and could not use proper vocabulary. Before starting to write the essay, they should collect words and phrases which are the most closely related to the topic and thus cannot be ignored. It is really difficult to put well-chosen words into the text, but there are some phrases and expressions that fit in most essays that have the same topic.

III) Essay correction and group writing:
``One advantage of learning in a classroom ... is that a group of people can gather much more information, and generally better information, much faster than one person can gather it.`` (Hubbard, 1988 p. 85.) Reading and correcting other students` essays is one way to show what and how students must not write in an essay. Besides looking at their own mistakes they could listen to each other’s opinions as well and get to know new information. That is why group writing activities are very useful; the students were really enthusiastic about it. By reading the essays, students could discover more and more expressions and phrases, which can be beneficial for them in their further studies later on. Studying and examining different points of view in different essays is a kind of inspiration; students realize that they can write better essays.

IV) Practice:
When I examined the table that I prepared about students` opinions about the Writing and Research Skills Course, the most frequent phrase they used was the lack of practice. Learning the writing techniques should be accompanied by constant practicing, in order to keep the balance of theory and practice. Theoretical rules are easy to memorize if they are accompanied by practicing, but learning rules in theory only, is like learning something by heart and forgetting it in a short time.

Conclusion:
Only three of the students that I interviewed, claimed that they did not have difficulties in essay writing any more after having finished the Writing and Research Skills Course. The other 19 students still had hardship either in writing the topic sentences or in paragraph organization.
„ If writing were only a skill, we could expect to master it in a short time, once and for all. Like typing and driving a car, we would expect to spend a few months at it before mastering it, and we would expect to maintain our skill with occasional practice.

But many people who write see writing as a great deal more than just a skill. For one thing, it offers many people individual rewards that are suited to them and not available any other way. In proportion to these rewards, it is harder to learn, and in fact requires an approach different from those we would employ to learn skills.” (Francis, 1988 p. 74)

The results of the survey and this citation also show that writing is not simply a skill that can be learnt or taught, it is a kind of innate talent possessed more or less. Though even people possessing this gift to a smaller extent can be successful in writing. Born with less writing skills but employing writing often because of work is a great help in developing this skill. It means that practicing or doing something regularly is a kind of self-education.

In the Writing and Research Skills Course students were happy about essay-correction and group writing activities. This fact shows that learning something visually and auditively results more success in a shorter time, than memorizing something and using it no more. The more senses are involved in learning, the deeper the learning will be.