Journalistc Writng Competencies of AB Communicaton Students: Basis for Development of Training Manual in Journalism William Mel C Paglinawan * College of Arts and Sciences, Notre Dame of Dadiangas University, General Santos City, Philippines * Corresponding author: Paglinawan WM, Assistant Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, Notre Dame of Dadiangas University, General Santos City, Philippines, Tel: +63 966 358 5731; E-mail: wliamp07@gmail.com Received date: Oct 10, 2018; Accepted date: Oct 12, 2018; Published date: Oct 18, 2018 Copyright: © 2018 Paglinawan WMC. This is an open-access artcle distributed under the terms of the Creatve Commons Atributon License, which permits unrestricted use, distributon, and reproducton in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citaton: Paglinawan WMC. Journalistc Writng Competencies of AB Communicaton Students: Basis for Development of Training Manual in Journalism. Global Media Journal 2018, 16:31. Abstract Journalism is one of the most vital courses pursued by students enrolled in the AB Communicaton program. Hence, this research and developmental study was conducted to determine the competencies of the students in journalism partcularly in the areas of editorial, feature, sports, news and headline writng; and, to develop a training manual to address the issues on students’ competencies. This research is employed the Communicatve Competency Framework of Canale and Swain in 1987, which brought the study into analyzing the grammatcal competencies of the students, specifcally in terms of lexico-semantc and syntax; and, their discourse competencies in the areas of content writng and cohesion. Consequently, fndings revealed that the AB Communicaton students have fair ability both in terms of their grammatcal and discourse competencies. For this reason, there is a high need of training students in journalistc writng. Moreover, perceptons of the students and industry partners, in terms of the journalistc needs and factors contributng to the development of journalistc competencies were investgated. Results also showed that there is need for students to develop their interest in journalism and as perceived by the industry partners, a need for a sufcient and appropriate instructon, drills, trainings and related pedagogical interventon is a necessitate among AB Communicaton students to surmount the challenges they encountered vis-à-vis journalistc writng. Keywords: Journalistc; Journalistc competence; AB communicaton; Grammatcal competence; Discourse competence Introducton Writng is ofen perceived as one of the most challenging aspects of second language learning and difcultes in writng diferent types of texts may come from the fact that writers have to understand the linguistc features such as pragmatc, syntax and semantcs and other components of these diferent text types. Palmer mentoned that in journalism, just like any other forms of writng, the writers are required to construct text discourse precisely in standard language; thus, observing grammatcal competencies and other aspects of text discourse such as creatng cohesion and coherence in the text. Failure to perform this, writng can be a painful and anxiety producing task for many individuals. Hence, Zinsser stated that, in journalism, nothing was easy and nothing was fun – journalism is hard and lonely, and the words will seldom just fow. In the United States, Yomiyama [1], explained that the improper use of linking words would result in global errors. This may lead to misunderstanding and even communicaton breakdown. In additon, excessive use of coordinaton made writen compositon tedious to read and difcult to focus on the ideas expressed. Thus, the text, whether in academic and creatve writng and even journalistc writng, sufers syntactcally and semantcally if the logical connectors are misused, underused, overused or improperly used. These connectors are identfed as sources of difculty in second language (L2) writng. Similarly, this will be difcult in writng using the frst language (L1) [2]. These are the common writng problems encountered by the students. Therefore, language teachers need to address this at present. For graduates of mass communicaton programs in the Philippines, such inability threatens the very core of a profession that depends upon communicatons skills. This concern about students' weak writng skills, which has been echoed by many, including Licuanan, who in an artcle in the Philippine-Star wrote: In journalism, they [students] need to learn the craf and art of writng. Unfortunately, most writng-across-the-curriculum programs are too hit-and-miss to inculcate a love of writng or even an attude of appreciatng the importance of writng. In General Santos City, an educatonal insttuton like Notre Dame of Dadiangas University (NDDU), ofers a four-year degree program such as AB Communicaton (formerly AB Mass Communicaton) where students are trained and developed Research Article Global Media Journal ISSN 1550-7521 Vol.16 No. 31:144 2018 This article is available from: globalmediajournal.com 1