A Study on the English Paragraph Writing Class: Focusing on Writing Assignments and Learners’ Opinions

Objectives This study aims to examine the difficulties and problems of English writing education and suggest educational implication through classes investigation. For this, the liberal arts English classes focused paragraph writing were applied process-oriented elements and various activities. Then analysed the writing assignments and the questionnaire after a whole class. Methods This research was based on the four types of paragraph writing assignments and a questionnaire. The total number of participants was 105 freshmen and consisted of three different majors, but 33 responded to the questionnaire. The writing classes were proceeded with two phases: the first half was on basic phase and the second half was on advanced phase. Four types of writing paragraphs were employed: DP(definition paragraph), PP(process paragraph), OP(opinion paragraph), NP(narrative paragraph). Two main components of the classes were process-oriented elements such as brainstorming and peer feedback and various activities such as individuals, paired, and small grouped ones. To identify the students’ degree of satisfaction and their opinions of whole writing classes, a questionnaire was employed. Results The writing assignments showed that most participants comprehended well enough the main features of tour types of paragraph According to the results of the questionnaire, the satisfaction of the English writing class was 4.64 out of 5. The two main reasons of satisfaction were the class managing style and instructor’s personal attitude to the classes. The difficulties of the four types paragraph writing were 2.64 out of 5, and the academic uusefulness of them were 4.11 out of 5 from the survey results. Conclusions Liberal arts English writing classes can be satisfied and highly related to the learners’ academic usefullness. Ii is necessary to reduce the difficulties of writing class through various approaches to them. In addition, it needs to make efforts to improve the balanced language learning by integrating with other language functions. It is required to take a long-term planning to do this.