Student Linguistic Factors and Achievement in Essay Writing among Senior Secondary School Two Students in Akinyele Local Government Area, Oyo State

This study investigated verbal ability and grammatical competence as determinants of secondary school students’ writing competence Akinyele Local Government Area, Oyo State. The descriptive design was adopted. Three instruments were used for data collection: The achievement test in English Essay Writing (r= 0.875), the Verbal ability test (r= 0.657), and Grammatical competence test (r= 0.889). Simple random sampling was adopted in the selection of respondents for this research work. One hundred (100) students were randomly selected from four secondary schools in Akinyele Local Government Area, Oyo State for the study. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation was used in analyzing the research hypotheses formulated in this research work. The results revealed that students’ verbal ability and grammatical competence influenced their achievement in essay writing. It is recommended that teachers should use appropriate strategies to improve students verbal ability and grammatical competence in order to improve their essay writing achievement.

Keywords: English as a second language (ESL), Essay writing, Grammatical Competence, and Verbal Ability.