Diversity of English composition of 6th grade primary school students in Korea

Diversity of English composition of 6th grade primary school students in Korea

  This paper aims to explore the diversity of writing performance among thirty four Korean sixth grade primary school students, by analysing their composition of stories. The data was collected from a single class in southern Seoul; first, a questionnaire was conducted, in order to increase understanding of the research context, and then students were given forty minutes to write a story based on six pictures. The data was analysed quantitatively as well as qualitatively. In the quantitative analysis, fluency and complexity were measured; for fluency, the total number of words and sentences were counted, and, for complexity, the syntactical characteristics were discussed. In the qualitative analysis, accuracy, approaches to writing, and support from L1 were discussed; accuracy was examined in terms of the types of errors the participants made in their writing. Analysis of students" writing shows that students are varied in terms of fluency, complexity, accuracy, approaches to writing, and support from L1. This suggests that we need to find ways to address this variation of ability in the English classroom.