Law Students’ Essay Writing Performance and their Writing Difficulties

Abstract

In this study, the researcher used a 5 scale scoring rubric employed by McCann (1989) and Nussbaum and Kardash (2005) as a tool to gauge the overall quality of 60 first year students’ writing tasks. The researcher also used a questionnaire to measure the level of students’ writing anxiety. Moreover, a semi structure interview is used to investigate the writing difficulties encountered by Thai EFL law students. The results of students’ writing tasks provided the valuable understandings that would assist Thai EFL teachers to understand their students’ weaknesses. Such valuable description can be used to help Thai EFL teachers improve their teaching activities to meet the demands of their students to develop their writing competences (Flower - Hayes, 1981; Leighton - Gierl; 2007). Knowledge about university students’ difficulties with writing is not sufficiently descriptive to effectively identify the right features of students’ problems with writing. There is a critical need to know more about the difficulties experienced by Law students, when they compose essays, in order to assess the overall quality of the Law students’ writing essays. A 5 scale scoring rubric employed by McCann (1989) and Nussbaum and Kardash (2005) was adopted to gauge the overall quality in this research study. Findings revealed that Law students’ writing tasks had weaknesses on various aspects, which lead to ineffective writing. Moreover, Law students experienced the high level of writing anxiety which prevent writing essays effectively.