Punctuation Marks Deficiency in EFL Students’ Paragraph writing The Case of Second Year LMD English Students at Biskra University

Abstract

This work attempted to explore and illustrate the EFL students’ use of punctuation marks in paragraph writing. It shows how the proper use of the marks precisely would help in conveying the exact meaning and maintaining organization in paragraph writing.The researcher has noticed that the students are able to answer activities and tasks, but when it comes to writing; they misuse them. Through the hypothesis, we intended to show the role of correct placement of punctuations in enhancingthe students’ paragraph writing. Our hypotheses- students are not familiar either with the importance of punctuation marks or their use, most of the students make the same errors when it comes to punctuation marks and studentsare not interested to learn the details due to the old- fashioned strategies in teaching writing. The data was gathered from a questionnaire. The gainedresults in the students’ questionnaire were contradictive to the students’ performance in their paragraph.In the questionnaire, students seem aware about the significance of the marks, but they keep ignoring them. They are not interested, and they prefer a modern means to facilitate using them. Finally, it can be concluded that students have to change their attitude toward each single element because whenever they learn it; they stay foreign language learners: each language has a grammatical rule academic function.