Desarrollo de la producción escrita en inglés al término de la Educación Secundaria Obligatoria española

Abstract

The present article is a research study on English language written production in the fourth year of the Spanish Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO). It aims to analyse the writing development in this subject, at the end of this educational stage in relation to three specific objectives: knowing the global competency level of the ESO students in writing, to report about the development of specific elements in the ESO students' written production and studying the differences in their written production in relation to the students' gender. Finally, we describe the average students characteristics in written production according to the Common European Framework. The global results allow us to conclude that only 10% of the students achieve the objective established by the Local Authorities and that female students obtain better results than males students (a mean score of 2,47 for girls and 2,08 for boys in a scale from 1 to 5 points). These differences are statistically significant according to the U de Mann-Whitney's non-parametric statistical procedure.