An Investigation of Paragraph Writing Problems Encountered by Level 3 GFP Students: A Case of A’sharqiyah University, Sultanate of Oman

This study aimed to identify the writing problems that are faced by level 3 General Foundation Programme (GFP) students and to find suitable strategies to deal with those problems. The study was conducted in A ’Sharqiyah University, Ibra, Sultanate of Oman, in September 2021. The rationale behind choosing level 3 was that teachers at the college level noticed that college students struggle with paragraph writing. The researcher used a descriptive research method (content analysis). Thirty-six level 3 students had been randomly selected and they had been informed to write a paragraph of 100-120 words on a given subject. The students’ paragraphs had been marked twice by six GFP teachers. The purpose was to pick out students’ mistakes and errors. The findings revealed that students encounter different writing problems: word choice, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, tenses, and sentence structure. In the light of those findings, some guidelines had been offered. For instance, students should read a lot; reading develops students’ vocabulary, grammatical structures, and knowledge of the world as well. In addition, the writing teacher should focus more on positive points of students’ writing and not the negative points. Moreover, teachers must praise students for their good attempts. Furthermore, teachers should, regularly, assign in-class writing activities. Finally, the writing teachers should share ideas and strategies on how to cope with paragraph writing problems.