RESEARCH PROPOSAL ABSTRACT

Writing Performance of Grade 7 students of ECNVHS during the New Normal

Maria Theresa R. Dejesa

Introduction

On a positive side, education attained through a learning process is frequently

seen as an important trait that plays a significant role in a nation's progress, because it

effectively results in the rise of new generations while relying on current and advanced

scientific foundations. This is very much true no matter what the education set-up of any

country in the world is. The extent of educators' understanding of teaching methods,

means, and theories, as well as their awareness of modern teaching orientations, is used

to measure this growth.

In this sense, the Department of Education (DepEd) here in the Philippines has

always envisioned and made it a purpose to ensure that all Filipinos receive quality

education, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. In light of the current state of

educational delivery, which encompasses the new normal setting, the department has

been presented with challenges that are impeding educational quality after many changes

have been implemented. The CoVid-19 pandemic created an almost-impossible-to-

surpass challenge, but the DepEd never fails to try and strive harder to never surrender.

As reforms and initiatives have been refocused on achieving tangible outcomes,

particularly for learners, a grimmer reality has emerged, one that is felt by every teacher

and policy implementer in the Department of Education: how to maintain learning and

education continuity when traditional teaching-learning modalities are no longer

available. The pervasiveness of the Corona Virus (COVID-19 effects) has really

chastised even the most fundamental and essential component of society, the educational

sector.

The Department of Education (DepEd) responded affirmatively, recommending

that Alternative Delivery Modalities (ADM) be established to address the challenges of

the COVID-19 epidemic and the needs of learners, resulting in a Basic Education

Learning Continuity Plan (BE-LCP). The pursuit of continuing educational delivery has

been guided by the provisions and directions of DepEd Order 014, s. DO 12, S. 2020 on

the Required Health Standards in Basic Education Offices and Schools and DO 12, S.

2020 on the Required Health Standards in Basic Education Offices and Schools To name

a few, the Basic Education Learning Continuity Plan (BE-LCP) has a deadline of 2020.

The Alternative Delivery Modalities (ADMs), particularly the Modular Distance

Learning (MDL), are urgent responses implemented by the DepEd to ensure continuity of

education, with the primary consideration that the country is in the process of adapting to

the new normal form of education at present, and continuous innovations of educators

and active involvement of other stakeholders are the driving force for its success.

Educational delivery, therefore, has to continue, notwithstanding the presence of a global

pandemic. The solution focused on keeping every other important element safe while

education still happens.

On the other hand, academic literacy, which encompasses reading, writing,

listening or speaking, have been determined in studies to be a main reason for success or

lack of academic success in university students (van Dyk, Zybrands, Cillie, & Coetzee,

2009). Learners who do not speak English as their first language are often being taught
and assessed in English. Not only do these learners have to grapple with learning new and

advanced subject matter as they proceed through school and university, but also with

learning the subject matter in a different language to their mother tongue.

According to Graham (2008), children who do not learn to write correctly are at a

significant disadvantage. They get worse grades in school, especially in subjects where

written tests and reports are used to measure students' progress. They are less likely to

utilize writing to support and enhance what they are learning in content classes than their

more talented classmates. There's a lot of evidence that writing about topics in science,

social studies, and other subjects helps students learn more. Writing is increasingly

utilized to evaluate applicants' qualifications, reducing the opportunity to attend college.

Advanced writing performance, according to Kellogg and Raulerson III (2008),

are a key part of academic accomplishment as well as later work-related performance.

However, advanced writing performance exams are rarely achieved by American kids

(National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2002). Working memory demands of

writing processes should be decreased to allow executive attention to manage interactions

among them, in order to reach greater levels of writing performance. In theory, this can

be accomplished by purposeful practice that teaches authors how to acquire executive

control through frequent writing chances and timely and relevant feedback.

According to Go (2010), even the initial stage in the writing process—choosing a

topic to write about—is a difficult undertaking. "Capture readers' interest," the teacher

always urges the students. However, this is a difficult undertaking because thoughts and

insights must be conveyed in a way that the readers can understand. Spelling,

punctuation, and other mechanics issues must all be rigorously adhered to. Furthermore,
according to Go, the correct use of words to meet the author's intended meaning is also

critical to the composition's or essay's overall soundness.

Effective writing abilities are essential in both higher education and the workplace

after graduation. The capacity to write a long text is the single best predictor of success in

freshman year course work. Gains in informative and analytical writing abilities are also

seen as a solid sign of higher education's usefulness. Finally, in a knowledge-based

economy, a considerable portion of the value added by enterprises is codified in written

documents, putting a premium on a literate workforce.

The planning of ideas, the development of text, and the review of ideas and text

are all organized by mature authors, imposing high demands on executive attention.

Given these demands, it's not unexpected that working memory constraints can be used to

explain both developmental and individual differences in writing skill. To write properly,

one must be able to retain various representations and govern interactions between

planning, generation, and reviewing. Through meta-cognitive management of these

processes, it appears that writing an extended text necessitates self-regulation of

planning, text generation, and reviewing.

Three facts suggest that enough working memory resources are required for self-

regulatory control of textual production. For starters, assessments of working memory

capacity are linked to writing ability. This is just one of several difficult cognitive tasks,

such as fluid intelligence tests, that are uniquely predicted by one's capacity to govern

processing through executive attention. Converging experimental findings suggest that

diverting executive attention with a concurrent task degrades text creation quality and

fluency (Ransdell, Levy, & Kellogg, 2002). Second, unless they acquire the mechanical
abilities of handwriting and spelling, children's ability to generate written text is limited.

During primary school, learning the mechanics of writing to the point of automaticity

frees up working memory components for planning, creating, and evaluating. Mastery of

handwriting and spelling is also required for authors to begin to gain the cognitive,

emotional, and behavioral control required to continue producing writings (Graham &

Harris, 2000). Third, it takes a decade or more of writing experience to progress to using

writing as a tool of thinking and language production.

Writers throughout late adolescence and early adulthood go beyond just telling

the reader what they know. As a result of generating writing and examining their

thoughts and content, mature adult authors modify their own ideas. They develop a habit

of using writing to work through issues and establish new knowledge structures in long-

term memory. Reviewing the material typically leads to more preparation, which changes

the author's perspective on the subject. Reviewing can also lead to additional language

generation, reducing the gap between what the author intends and what the text now says.

Concurrent representations of the author's ideas and the text's meaning in working

memory are required for such knowledge transformation. It also necessitates the

coordination of numerous complicated interconnections across the planning, generating,

and evaluating processes.

Working memory constraints limit each of these fundamental activities. The

number of processes a writer can coordinate at once, as well as the quality of those

processes, are both contingent on achieving adequate fluency with each. In the absence of

sufficient mastery of and cognitive control over planning, generating, and evaluating,

writers appear to never progress beyond knowledge telling. The development of cognitive
control in writing is undoubtedly influenced by a number of factors. These include (1)

working memory maturation throughout adolescence, (2) learning strategies for pre-

writing, drafting, and revision that manage composition demands, and (3) rapid retrieval

of domain-specific knowledge from long-term memory when needed during composition,

avoiding the need for transient storage in short-term working memory (Kellogg, 2001;

McCutchen, 2000). The use of purposeful practice to directly minimize the working

memory demands of each writing process, on the other hand, provides an obvious and

potentially effective alternative that has yet to be completely realized in writing

education.

Matias (2013), for example, aimed to determine the level of writing performance

among Grade 7 students in terms of content, organization, vocabulary, and other factors

in her study. The kids' writing abilities ranged from fair to good, according to the

researcher. Their difficulties with writing showed their inability to come up with proper

words to utilize, as well as the fact that their teacher had assigned the topic.

students gained the most in mechanics, then organization, because their teacher

gave them clear guide questions to answer in their output, vocabulary, because students

were given daily activities on vocabulary building, and content because they were given

daily activities in the lessons tackled, according to Galang, et al. (2010). The students

made the least progress in terms of language used, indicating that they were having

difficulty transitioning to a second language, particularly in terms of writing.

These instances demonstrate that students at all levels struggle with writing, not

just compositions, but in nearly every aspect of writing. In terms of English writing,

college, high school, and primary students all exhibit not only deficiencies but also
genuine under performance. Teachers interviewed and actual student outputs backed with

these claims.

Teaching writing is a difficult undertaking, despite the fact that students are

constantly encouraged to enhance their writing abilities, their results speak for

themselves. The kids consistently demonstrated inadequate writing performance in the

areas of topic, organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics.

Aside from that, students have clear issues with grammar and sentence

construction. Given that grade 7 students must demonstrate a certain level of writing skill

in order to cope with higher thinking demands in a high school setting, and motivated by

the foregoing premises, the researcher was prompted to examine the level of writing

performance of these students, as well as the problems they face during the pandemic.

These were the researcher's starting points for developing practical solutions that might

be implemented in schools especially during this infliction of the pandemic.

Review of Related Literature and Studies

Writing is the most difficult skill to teach and develop when compared to other

skills. It must be taught and learned in the setting in which it is most effective.

Swimming theories, ideas, and practices should be applied by a youngster beginning to

swim. Only if the youngster is in the water can this happen. He will not be able to learn

to swim until he is in a pool. A youngster must practice the rules in writing only if he is

requested to write, similar to how he must practice the rules in reading. Also, the writing

teacher must identify the context of learning: this includes culture, literature and identity.

Native speakers of English are direct and straight forward while the Asians, English
language learners, are identified in a style which is circuitous. This observation must be

considered as regards the Filipino language learners and must be observed by English

language teachers.

In addition, Mendoza (2020) said that various intervention initiatives are being

implemented by the Department of Education to help Filipino children who are falling

behind in reading and writing. The Every Child A Reader Program (ECARP) will

initially assess public elementary kids' reading abilities in both English and Filipino. The

assessment tool's findings will be used to develop appropriate interventions at the school,

division, regional, and national levels to ensure that every kid is able to read and write at

grade level. ECARP, according to the Department of Education, intends to provide

elementary school students in public schools with strategic reading and writing abilities

in order to help them become autonomous early readers and writers. The intervention

program includes Reading Recovery (RR) which will give students who are lagging

behind in reading and writing a chance to catch up through specialized one-to-one

reading assistance from a teacher trained in RR procedures, DepEd said in a statement.

Moreover, Saavedra (2020) revealed that many elementary students have poor

writing skills in English and Filipino, according to their experiences and observations

while teaching writing to the students: 1) lack of vocabulary in the target language; 2)

difficulty in conveying and organizing ideas; 3) students' perception that writing is a

difficult task; 4) lack of motivation and interest in writing; and 5) difficulty in spelling,

grammar, and sentence construction. These factors are due to the students' first

languages (Chabacano, Bahasa Sug, and Cebuano), with English and Filipino serving as

L2 solely. Despite the effort of teachers, they acknowledged that elementary students’
writing skills still did not meet the standard in writing. As a result, they are hopeful that

adopting the K–12 curricula will help students improve their writing skills, which have

been worsening for some time. It's also worth noting that curriculum developers,

particularly language specialists, should consider how to help our students enhance their

writing skills in L2.

Furthermore. writing has been dubbed the "neglected R" (National Commission on

Writing in America's Institutions and Colleges, 2003) in comparison to reading and

arithmetic due to a lack of concentration at all levels in K-12 schools. Today's workforce

employees, more than ever, require sophisticated writing skills to be successful. Half of

all companies consider employees' writing skills when making promotion decisions

(National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, 2004). Two-thirds

of salaried positions require some writing responsibilities, and half of all companies

consider employees' writing skills when making promotion decisions.

Likewise, according to the National Evaluation of Educational Progress (NAEP)

(2011), writing assessment, just around a quarter of students in both 8th and 12th grades

were proficient in utilizing writing to share experience, explain, or convince in 2011.

From primary grades forward, more focus is placed on exposing kids to writing for a

variety of reasons and for different audiences, thanks to the establishment of the

Common Core State Standards. Elementary students, on the other hand, are frequently

exposed to reading and writing narrative material and are familiar with it. Compared to

middle school students, they know less about producing informative or persuasive texts.

Moreover, surface features like as spelling, punctuation, and language form have

been known to be more important to elementary kids than global aspects of writing such
as organization, content, or implications for the reader, Barbiero (2011) said. Young

students, who typically struggle with language use and English grammar, may be even

more preoccupied with form. Young writers are recognized for writing shorter, less

complicated sentences with fewer adjectives and adverbs, as well as displaying a variety

of English morphological and syntactic use problems, such as verb agreements,

omissions of function words, and jumbled word order.

There is also faith in teaching particular genre features to children and providing

them with opportunities for collaborative writing to assist them improve their writing

talents. Strassman and Schirmer (2013) identified approach training and collaborative

writing to be promising strategies in a review of the research on writing instruction for

deaf children.

On the other hand, Mascle, et al. (2013) investigated writing attitudes among

students in terms of English. Their research was linked to final grades, assessments, and

comments.

A link was discovered between writing attitudes and self-perceptions of writing

talents by Shah, Mahmud, Din, Yusof, and Pardi (2011).

Zhao and Dong (2011) looked at college students' self-efficacy, writing goal setting,

and self-motivation, whereas Wang (2013) looked into students' writing attitudes in

relation to Chinese learning.

Filipino students' ideas and views of their writing skills and writing self-confidence

in relation to writing anxiety and exposure to English were researched by Paria and De

Leon (2013); a similar study was undertaken by Cequea et al (2013).

 Gupta and Woldemariam (2011) did a study on college students’ attitudes towards

writing instruction, writing strategies, and writing tasks.

On the other hand, Sultana (2009) explored primary-level students’ and college

students’ feedback receptiveness.

Grade 7 Filipino learners are lagging behind their Southeast Asian counterparts in

reading, writing, and arithmetic, according to a regional study, with a large percentage of

students still performing at levels expected in the early years of elementary education,

Balinbin (2020) said. The percentage of Grade 7 Filipino students who attained

minimum competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic was much lower than Vietnam

and Malaysia, according to data from the Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics

(SEA-PLM) 2019 released on Tuesday. Fifth-graders in the Philippines performed on

par with Cambodians, if not somewhat lower, but slightly better than those in Laos and

Myanmar.

Moreover, only 1% of Grade 7 students in the Philippines earned “higher levels” of

proficiency in writing, meaning they met the highest level under the study's standards,

according to UNICEF (2020) surveyed. These students can "write cohesive texts with

detailed concepts and a good range of appropriate terminology." In the Philippines,

nearly half of Grade 7 students, or 45 percent, were in the lowest band, meaning they had

"little capacity to communicate ideas in writing."

The findings of the study conducted by Cabigao (2020) revealed the following: (1)

appropriately-developed writing activities or exercises are necessary for assisting

learners in improving their basic writing skills; (2) learners can enjoy writing by giving

them pre-activities to set a positive mood at the start of each writing activity; (3) home
visits can be used to seek parents' support and assistance in monitoring their children's

progress in writing tasks; and (4) learners can enjoy writing by giving them pre-activities

to set a positive mood at the start of each writing activity.

A five-point rating system per DepEd Order No. 31, series 2012 was utilized to

measure learners' level of writing proficiency. Learners are still perplexed with

themselves at the initial level. They lack the basic abilities required for independent

tasks, whereas learners at the emerging level have the basic skills but still require close

supervision to complete tasks. The required competences are built among learners at the

approaching proficiency level, and with little support from teachers, the learners may use

what they have learned to complete tasks. Learners can undertake learning independently

or without the help of their teacher at the proficient level. Learners can now demonstrate

automatic application of what they have learned in executing specified tasks at the

advanced level, which is the highest step.

Method

Type of Research

The researcher plans to implement this research with the use of quantitative

research methodology, particularly the descriptive method. According to Wickford

(2020) in an article called “Descriptive Research Strategies”, the goal of descriptive

research is to understand a specific set of variables in a group of individuals, but does not

go beyond to understanding the relationship between the variables, what caused them or

what their implications are. This type of design is deemed fit in the present study because

the goal will only be focused on determining the level of writing performance of grade 6
students. The study will also not aim to establish any statistical relationships between the

variables included in the Research Questions.

Respondents

All the 30 Grade-7 students of Eduardo Cojuangco National Vocational High

School during the School Year 2021-2022 will be the respondents of this research study.

The researcher plans to include them all to have a more accurate and firmer source of

data to better identify the writing performance level of the grade 7 junior high school

students who are also experiencing challenges during the CoVid-19 pandemic.

Instruments

To determine the problems encountered by the students on writing as to

knowledge on the topic, language used, time and duration of writing, materials and

resources, and motivation and interest, the questionnaire developed by Biala (2013) and

Galang, et al. (2010) were used. For each of the area, there were five (5) benchmark

statements which describe problems encountered.

The instruments will face validated by experts in the field of English teaching,

education, and research before the actual use in this research. Similarly, the researcher

sought the academic assistance of her professor in Project Paper.

Data Collection Procedure

After permissions from authorities will be secured, the researcher will conduct

the writing sessions for the students for two (2) consecutive days online. The third day
will be allocated for the fielding of a questionnaire aimed at identifying the problems

encountered by the students on their writing performance.

The researcher will orient the respondents of the expectations of their writing

activities through Google Meet. The researcher will first ask them interesting to topics to

write about, their experiences and readings. In the first day, they will choose themes or

subjects from the following: current events (composition or editorial), school life

(feature), and social awareness (editorial or evaluative essay). They will be told to make

their works simple and achievable. Once approved, the students will be allowed to write

about the topics of their choice to encourage them to write about their own interest. In

the first day, they will be required to finish their outputs on current events while they

will be permitted to write only their drafts for the second subject (school life) which will

be in the form of a feature article. They will then be assigned to research or make their

drafts for the second subject which will be on social awareness. After finishing their

third output on the second day, they will answer a checklist on the problems they

encounter in writing.

With the help of an English teacher, the outputs will be evaluated with the use of

a scale by Hughey et al. (1983). Their scores will be averaged, with the average means

of the problems they will encounter, and will present in accordance with the aims of this

study.

Data Analysis

The score range of the responses of the students will be computed to arrive at
conclusive data needed in this study using the Scoring Guides/Rubric (Hughey, et al.,
1983; Matias, 2013).
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