An Analysis of Junior High School Students’ Skill in Creating Written Compositions: A Research Report

Abstract

This article is a report based on a qualitative study on the skills needed for junior high school students to produce written compositions in the context of creating a short message. This kind of research has been made necessary by the implementation of an obligatory exam for junior high school graduates, including a writing part in which there are some requirements to be met in order to obtain a positive grade. Although the recent educational reforms mean that junior high schools will no longer exist, this research is useful in the diagnosis of the writing skills of Polish teenagers that will be going into high school. The results have shown that the students had no major problems with such requirements as text organization, punctuation rules and with keeping to the word limit for a given written composition. On the other hand, however, the students showed the need for improvement in formal aspects of the written English language such as grammar, vocabulary accuracy and spelling and transition signals. Additionally, the meeting of requirements mentioning and developing three elements should be practiced more. For the purpose of the study, an analysis sheet has been implemented but no hypotheses have been put forth. The research group included 33 written compositions.