A Suggested Method for Teaching English Descriptive Composition to First Year Students of the College of Physical Education

This investigation presents that most of the first year students of the College of Physical Education find it difficult to write a piece of composition. They can not express themselves in their writing, because they lack the ability to express their thoughts in English. The aim of this research is to improve the students' ability to handle the basic skills of writing good composition and to provide them with some knowledge of the features of a good composition. The researchers hypothesizes that the interference students of Arabic, which characterize the student performance, have a negative consequence on their final product. The procedure followed in this paper is based on asking 26 students to write descriptive compositions. After the test, the errors are identified, classified and analyzed statistically. The results indicate that the highest number of errors is in mechanics of writing, followed by sentence structure, and style.


Lect. Shatha H. Sadallah& B.A. Mafaz K. Hammoodi 
This investigation presents that most of the first year students of the College of Physical Education find it difficult to write a piece of composition. They can not express themselves in their writing, because they lack the ability to express their thoughts in English. The aim of this research is to improve the students' ability to handle the basic skills of writing good composition and to provide them with some knowledge of the features of a good composition. The researchers hypothesizes that the interference students of Arabic, which characterize the student performance, have a negative consequence on their final product. The procedure followed in this paper is based on asking 26 students to write descriptive compositions. After the test, the errors are identified, classified and analyzed statistically. The results indicate that the highest number of errors is in mechanics of writing, followed by sentence structure, and style.

Introduction:
In writing a good composition, the students should learn three main parts. The first one is the introduction, which contains the topic sentence carrying the main idea. The development of the topic sentence can be either partial or complete. The second part is the body of composition which embraces the main contents of the composition, and finally the conclusion. As far as the types of composition are concerned, a composition can be either descriptive, narrative, expositive, and argumentative. Our main concern in this study is the descriptive composition.
Most Iraqi learners of English find it difficult to write a piece of descriptive composition. To express themselves adequately, students need many things, among which are: a-the necessary information. b-The ability to arrange this information in a logical order. c-The power to express it clearly, pleasantly and effectively. Writing well does not only mean to avoid making mistakes in both grammar and spelling, but also have a good style, i.e., choosing the right topic and using the good words then joining such words in the right order.

Theoretical Background:
The word "composition" comes from a Latin word meaning "putting together". Hanks and Porter (1972: 343) define the term composition as the art of putting words and sentences together in accordance with the rules of grammar and ADAB AL-RAFIDAYN, VOL.(66)

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٤٣ rhetoric. The term composition is also defined as a short piece of writing done at school, in an exam…etc (Hornby, 1961: 149 andSteel, 2000: 136). Al-Nakkash (1978: 130) gives a similar definition. She states that composition is any piece of continuous written English and not merely single unrelated sentences. Suleimani (1996: 22) defines composition as a type of activity used in developing writing skill. Rutherford (2008: 2) states that composition in a written language refers to the process and study of creating written works or pieces of literature. According to the composition theorist, Bartholomae (2008: 327), composition is the institutionally supported desire to recognize and evaluate the writing of unauthorized writers, to control writing in practice and to define it as an object of professional scrutiny.
In this research we are concerned with purely descriptive composition which is a record of observed facts (Al-Hamash, 2000: 81). Alexander (1965: 18) defines descriptive composition as an act of writing that is generally required to describe people, objects, or scenes. For Furnish (1996: 192) if one is trying to describe a scene, an event or a time in history, he must put the reader there by including vivid details. Description creates a dominant impression on persons, places, or things through the use of vivid details arranged so that the reader can also see or experience the thing described (Forlini, 1982: 505). Or it may be purely imaginary (Alexander, 1965: 18

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complex, as when one describes a well known building, person, or a piece of natural scenery.

The Plan of Writing Composition:
Glatthorn, Rosen (1990: 119) states that one can plan a composition by using many of the techniques used for planning paragraphs of first finding a topic then developing the topic by following three steps: -listing details -identifying the main points -organizing the supporting information.
Al-Hamash (2000: 77 f) mentions essential points that must be followed in writing a composition. For him, a good composition is built gradually. It follows many steps. First, gathering sufficient material on the subject and this involves making a list of any ideas on the subject. Second, finding a way of arranging the material in some sort of logical order, and these are sorted out under sub-headings. Then, they must be collected under proper headings. These sub-headings will not be the topics of paragraphs. In the finished composition, Al-Hamash (Ibid: 77) concludes that when composition is written, one should read it very carefully, watching particularly for misused inappropriate words and for errors in spelling, word order, and punctuation.

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٤٥ A good composition must have a controlling idea and minor ones which develop the controlling idea. According to linguists the controlling idea may be encompossed in a sentence or a paragraph (Chaplen: 1970, Forlini: 1982 1956 among many others). The controlling idea is the central idea that is developed in a paragraph. Therefore, it is the summary of all the information contained in the paragraph.
According to Chaplen (1970: 9), if the controlling idea is contained in one sentence, that sentence is called the topic sentence because it contains the idea or topic that is developed and explained in the rest of the paragraph. The topic sentence may be found at the beginning of the paragraph, in the middle or at the end. Thus, it is the central idea that is developed in a paragraph.

The Properties of a Good Composition:
A good composition should have the following properties: coherence, unity and order of importance.

2. 3. 1. Coherence:
It is an application of the general use of this term in discourse analysis, referring to the main principle of organization postulated to account for the underlying functional connectedness or identity of a piece of spoken or written language (Text, discourse). It involves the study of such factors as the language users' knowledge of the world, the inference they make, and the assumptions they hold, and in particular of the way in which coherent communication is meditated through the use of speech acts. In this context, agree that a paragraph has coherence when sentences follow a logical order; that is, a paragraph has the quality of coherence when all parts cling together in a systematic arrangement. Coherence, therefore, is the product of many different factors, which combine to every paragraph, every sentence and every phrase contribute to the meaning of the whole piece.

2. 3. 2. Unity:
Linguists do not talk about the unity of composition but they usually give some properties of a unified paragraph. To achieve a paragraph unity, a writer must ensure two things: First, the paragraph must have a single generalization that serves as the focus of attention, i.e., a topic sentence. Second, a writer must control the content of every other sentence in the paragraph's body such as: (a) more specific information than the topic sentence and: (b) maintaining the same focus of attention as the topic sentence (Kies, 2008: 1). In this regard, Glatthorn and Rosen (1990: 107) point out that a paragraph has unity when all the sentences tell about one main idea. In the same vein, Al-Hamash (2000: 26) states that a paragraph has unity when each sentence is clearly related to the controlling idea and when no important information about the controlling idea is missing. Lack of unity stems when the writer ADAB AL-RAFIDAYN, VOL.(66)

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٤٧ mistakenly includes one or two sentences that do not belong (Glatthorn and Rosen, Ibid).

2. 3. 3. Order of Importance:
The order of importance is the way of organizing ideas according to the degree of their value, power, authority, interest, or quality (Marques, 2008: 1 & 110). Glatthorn and Rosen (1990: 110) state that if you use order of importance to recognize a paragraph, you can begin with the most important details and end with least important details. They add that you can also begin with least important and end with the most important ones.

4. Punctuation and Mechanics of Writing Composition:
Punctuation marks are signs or symbols that string all the words together and they make the meaning clear (Al-Hamash, 2000: 43). They act as signals to readers and tell them where to pause or stop (Forlini, 1982: 333 andFurnish, 1996: 85) when to read with a questioning tone and when to read with excitement (Forlini, 1982: 333). They also connect ideas or set ideas apart.
In this research, we are concerned with the use of "semicolon". A semicolon looks like a full stop (period) above a comma (;) (Forlini, 1982: 333). They are used to join two sentence structures that are connected by conjunctive adverbs or phrases like besides, however, indeed…..etc. (Furnish, 1996: 89 f). They are considered as longer pauses than is indicated by commas. They are also used when one wants the reader to see It is important to mention that semicolons used to separate independent clauses such as: but, as you will, also recall, and finally. They also show how to place the two thoughts in the same sentence (Suberman, 1956: 38 f). Thus, punctuation marks are signs or symbols that string all the words together and they make the meaning clear like semicolon.

Procedure and Data Analysis:
This paper selects (26) compositions written by first year students in the college of Physical Education. Many steps are followed in order to enable the students to write these explanations. The first is to give them an explanation of the subjects to be tackled in writing a descriptive composition. The second step is to explain briefly the basic steps of writing, the division of idea into controlling and minor ideas, the arrangement of information, expressing thoughts in English, the division of composition paragraphs, and finally ending the composition adequately. In writing, the students depend on their background knowledge in English, as well as on the information given by the researchers. Moreover, the researchers have given them information about writing a good

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٤٩ composition, including, mechanics of writing and arranging ideas cohesively. The researchers have also explained to them, how to end their composition successfully. The topics that the students are asked to write on are. " your friend", "your home", "rainy day", or "your first day in college". Most of the instructions and subjects were taken from (Al-Hassan and Razzak, 2000: 77 78 -91 -92).
The researchers followed Searle and Dillon method of analyzing data, so the criteria for good writing could be classified in three major categories; mechanics (legible handwriting; correct spelling and punctuation, etc), language structure (correct sentence structures, proper use of tense, good use of topic sentence, and good paragraph construction, etc). and style (interesting style, good variety of sentences, different ideas divided in to different paragraphs, imaginative and precise use of vocabulary, good organization, use of connectives, individual style, etc). All three categories deal with forms of language (Searle and Dillon, 1980: 238) as shown in the following table. The errors in mechanics of writing, language, structure, and style are found in all composition paragraphs, the rate of errors in body takes the highest proportion. It is about (47,5%) as shown in the table above. The second high proportion of errors is found in the introduction. It is about (28,7%). The third rate is found in the conclusion which is the lowest proportion. It is about (23,6%). Below are the tables of statistical results of the tests:

Results and Discussion:
Though the students were given lectures about writing composition, they found serious difficulties in writing a descriptive composition. The researchers found from analyzing the test that (13) compositions were rather good and the other (13) were not adequate. The good compositions were characterized by right use of mechanics of writing, good ideas, arrangement of good information according to the rules of composition writing and organizing the sentences in paragraphs cohesively. However, some week points have been identified in their writings. First, the interference of the mother tongue, spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes. The other (13) compositions were full of grammatical and spelling mistakes that constitute the highest in the total performance of the students; they lack arrangement of ideas, clarity and cohesion, as it is shown in the tables. So, the analysis of the compositions indicates that the large number of the students' errors (41,6%) are in the mechanics of writing as shown in table (1). The language structure errors percentage was (30%) as shown in table (2), whereas the stylistic errors percentage was (28,2%) as shown in table (3) which is the lowest proportion. Generally

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٥٣ speaking, it is also considered as a high rate of committing errors. This means that the students construct wrong sentences. Such errors seem to be due to the interference of the students mother tongue which is Arabic. The students tried to construct their sentences on the model of the Arabic structure which affects the style when writing in English.

Conclusions:
This paper proves that the 1 st year students of Physical Education College made all types of errors in composition writing. This investigation reveals that the high rate of errors in mechanics of writing which include spelling and punctuation is about (61,7%). Whereas the second category is language structure errors, which includes sentence structure, tense, topic sentence. This has the highest rate of errors in the use of proper tense it is about (42,7%). On the other hand, the stylistic errors, in the third category include ideas, vocabulary, and organization. The ideas constituted again a highly rate of (42,6%). Here the reader may be confused, and also unable to understand what the student mean in his writing.
Finally, the present study paves the way for adopting certain teaching programs and procedures intended for making the students think in English and express their ideas in correct sentences without interference with their mother tongue.