Impact of Vocabualry Awareness on Developing EFL Learners Writing Skills

Abstract

This study sets out to investigate “The Impact of Vocabualry Awareness in Developing EFL Learners Writing Skills”. The focus of this study is secondary school EFL learners who appeare to have very little or none of suffiecient and core vocabulary knowledge by which they can write effectively. The main aim of this study is to raise teachers and leaners’ awareness of the vocabulary importance in developing their writing Skills, and to discover the reasons behind their failure to choose the correct lexical items in their writing. The data of this study was collected through two instruments: questionnaires and tests. Two questionnaires were designed for both teachers and students. Beside the student’s questionnaire, two reading and two writing tests were also administered to the students. The subjects who participated in this study were randomly selected from different schools in Kassala State. A number of 50 teachers and 50 students were choosen and they were asked to fill in a constructed questionnaire sheets. The data was analysed using descriptive method and chi-square analysis. The findings of the study revealed that EFL learners always find it difficult to select words when they write, which is due to their incomplete knowledge and ignorance of the lexical items they learn. In addition to that, the study has also revealed that teachers were not committed to writing activities and do not train and encourage students to practice writing using the new lexical items they learnt. The findings have also shown that the syllabus does not emphasize on the development of learning and teaching vocabualry which results in effective writing, the teaching of vocabulary in the syllabus is not integrated in a way that meets the students’ needs to write, there is no regular and systematic assessment of students’ vocabulary development within the context of writing, students are always lacking the syntactic and Semantic properties of individual lexical items, students face difficulties choosing the correct lexical items and organizing them in a very cohesive and related paragraph, there is no awareness raising of words importance and their positive role in developnig students writing skills, and there are not suffiecient writing activities which motivate and reinforce the students’ use of vocabulary words when writing. The study recommended that Syllabi should be refined or replaced with an integrative one (lexical syllabi) to meet the learners’ needs. Also, teachers’ awareness should be risen to deal with vocabulary seriously. Moreover, there should be effective and regular teaching and learning of vocabulary, applying a fixed plan in a clear and efficient way on each lesson. In addition, Learners should be well trained on how to use VLSs.