A research on writing abilities of 9th grade students in Ankara Kızılcahamam county secondary schools

In this study, writing abilities of 9th grade students in Ankara Kızılcahamam County secondary schools were analysed. Target population of the study was 9th grade students who attended Ankara Kızılcahamam County secondary schools during 2009-2010 school year. The study was conducted with 120 subjects who come from different socio-economic classes in selected three secondary school institutions.During the study, the students were given various topics by which they could express themselves easily and they were asked to write composition. Moreover, information about the characteristics of the subjects and variables which may affect writing were gathered by means of a personal information form. These compositions were analysed in terms of ambiguity and they were examined to see whether the results had meaningful correlation with various variables. Besides, a questionnaire was prepared and conducted to determine the frequency and the kind of ambiguities the Language and Expression teachers encounter in all sorts of students? written texts.As the result of this study, it has been found out that the students formed 2250 sentences in total and 616 of these sentences included ambiguity. The results revealed that %51,35 of all these ambiguities were related to grammar and %48,65 of them were related to semantics. The study showed that the %19,1 of the ambiguities in the compositions were either due to absence or misuse of suffixes and %16,4 of the ambiguities were due to absence of part of speech. However, ambiguity which results from the absence of complementary verb was never identified. The frequency of teachers? confronting such ambiguity problems was in general similar to the results of the study. Furthermore, although the writing abilities of the students coming from different socio-economic class schools differed greatly, it did not differ much from their habits of reading books, following periodicals, keeping diaries and writing poems or stories.Considering the results of the study, it was understood that the students are not at the intended level of proficiency in writing. The students, parents, teachers and the authors of the programmes were offered certain suggestions by means of the findings of the study.Key Words: Language, Expression, Writing, Ambiguity.