Difficulties in Essay Writing for Japanese Learners in University of Kelaniya – Based on Misuse of Sentence Structure

Abstract

An essay is a short piece of writing that expresses information as well as the writer’s opinion. Grammatical misuse is a significant issue in essay writing, of which the misuse of the sentence structure has been observed as a recurrent problem for students. The sentence structure refers to the physical organization and the nature of the ordering of elements in a sentence. The misapplication of the sentence structure has become a significant problem among Japanese language learners. This study aims to focus on the sentence structure in order to improve the writing skills of learners. Hence, this study will be investigated according to a quantitative analysis of the misuse of the sentence structures in essay writing activities of Japanese language learners at the University of Kelaniya. The analysis of this research study will be based on five clarifications of sentence structures such as, the misuse of the main part and the predicate, the misuse of the cause/ effect, the misuse of interrogative sentences, the misuse of the supposition, and the misuse of the sentence pattern. This research study will examine the data collected from fifty research participants, who have been categorized according to their academic year. The data will be gathered from the participants who have been tasked to write an essay between 600 and 700 characters under a given topic within a duration of one hour. The fifty essays collected from the participants representing the four categories of students will be considered as the primary data for the research study. This study will then assess and analyze the student responses to explore the most common errors of misuse conducted by the learners. In addition, the study will demonstrate the common causes for structural misuses in essay writing. Moreover, this paper aims to examine the source of the misuse errors and to propose a method of study for Japanese language learners that will aid to reduce the frequency of such mistakes in future.