Abstract:
This study aimed to identify the writing problems that secondary school students face in writing in the area of sentence structure and paragraph development. It Identifies the major errors that are made by those students. It also aims to show ways or techniques of how to build a paragraph. The study tries to find out the sources of these difficulties and suggests ways of how to overcome these problems.
The researcher has adopted the descriptive and analytical method. The researcher collected the data using a questionnaire for the teachers of secondary schools and a test for the students of the secondary level. The sample is 100 English language teachers of secondary schools. The researcher got them in the Sudanese Certificate Correction Center in Khartoum, among them were teachers of Eldammar Secondary School for Girls. Another sample is 100 students from the secondary level in River Nile state ( Eldammar Secondary School for Girls). The researcher used (SPSS) program to analyze the results of both the test and the questionnaire. The results revealed from the test that there was a great weakness in sentence structure and paragraph development, most of the students lack the ability to construct well-formed sentences, they are not able to perform good writing with correct spelling and good grammar, they are not able to use the punctuation and capitalization properly. Therefore, according to the study findings, the researcher recommends that teaching writing must be the most important goal of teaching English and teachers should concentrate on paragraph writing and give especial care to students writing assessment,Students need more time to practice writing and teachers need much training before being teachers. In addition to some suggestions for further studies.
