Second Year Students’ Problems in Mastering English Sonnet

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to analyze students’ problems in Mastering English Sonnet for Second Year Iraqi Students of The Department of English at AL-Yarmouk University. This study aims at investigating the difficulties face by Iraqi EFL college students in identifying and producing English Poetry and finding out areas of difficulty in this respect, and the achievement of Second year college students in the area of English Poetry. In addition, the paper also aims to highlight the main Discrimination between students in learning English Poetry. The population of the present study comprised all the 40 students at the mentioned College for the academic year 2015-2016. The sample of the study included (20 students (male and female) of the same College for the academic year 2015-2016. A test was presented in the type of Recognition and Production level see appendix (A). The Students papers were scored by the researcher herself. The obtaining data reveal the following findings:-1- The Item Difficulty of the test in (task one and task two) Recognition test rate from (20-80) percent and its acceptable according to Bloom, Madaus and Hastings (1981: 202).2- The Item Discrimination of the test in (task one and two) Recognition test rate from (27- 85) percent. It is acceptable due to Brown (1981: 104) who states that "The item is acceptable when its discriminating power is 20 percent and above".3- The Item Difficulty of the test in (task three and four) Production test rate from (63- 73) percent, and it’s higher than the Recognition test. The test shows that students perform in recognition test better than production one. In another way, students find some difficulties in production tasks which demands produce English poetry more than recognize it.4- The Item Discrimination of the test in (task three and four) Production test rate from (81- 85) percent, and it’s higher than the Recognition test. The test shows that students perform in recognition test better than production one. In another way, task three and four (production) seems more discriminate the high level students from the low level students in English poetry more than in recognition test.5- The test shows that, the computed t-value is lower than the tabulated one, this proves that our subjects (2nd year students) have failed to identify and produce English Poetry by form and function on the whole test.