Developing narrative writing skills via a reading programme for low English Language proficiency undergraduates
This paper investigates the effects of a reading programme on the narrative writing skills of low English Language proficiency level undergraduates in a Malaysian university. A total of eighteen narrative texts closely associated with the undergraduates’ personal experiences were prepared by the...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2018
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13766/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13766/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13766/1/19477-76292-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | This paper investigates the effects of a reading programme on the narrative writing skills of
low English Language proficiency level undergraduates in a Malaysian university. A total of
eighteen narrative texts closely associated with the undergraduates’ personal experiences
were prepared by the researchers for a reading-writing intervention programme. This quasiexperimental
study involved 192 undergraduates who participated in a nine-week
intervention programme. The pre-test and post-test mean scores indicated significant
differences in the undergraduates’ content development, lexical variety and grammatical
accuracy. The findings show that there is an improvement in content, lexical variety and
grammatical accuracy in students’ essays. The undergraduates’ improvement in the content
development aspect shows that reading texts which supplement information common to the
undergraduates’ background will help them in their content development specifically and
writing performance on the whole. The study also shows that the reading materials,
vocabulary input and comprehension exercises helped the undergraduates to improve on their
use of lexical variety and grammatical structure. The results support the notion that
comprehensible input (Krashen, 1984) and appropriate language instructional exercises for
writing intervention enable engaged learning by the students. The study therefore
recommends that teachers should utilise authentic reading materials that are relevant to the background knowledge of the students in teaching writing to low English proficiency level
undergraduates. |
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