Abstract
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 quasi- experimental 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. Keywords:
Highlights
Writing has always been regarded as an important component in language learning
Studies have shown that English as a Second Language (ESL) learners have the tendency to use their first language (L1) in their second language (L2) writing practices to make up for linguistic deficiencies
The students who participated in the study were those categorised as ‘limited’ (Band 2) and ‘extremely limited’ (Band 1) users according to the Malaysian University English Test (MUET)
Summary
Writing has always been regarded as an important component in language learning. All texts are inevitably made up of lexical and grammatical words (Quiller-Couch, 1916) that deliver a content or message. Low proficiency second language (L2) learners face challenges in completing writing tasks mainly due to lack of lexical and grammatical knowledge to put forth their thinking into words that convey a certain meaning or story. Studies have shown that English as a Second Language (ESL) learners have the tendency to use their first language (L1) in their second language (L2) writing practices to make up for linguistic deficiencies This commonly occurs when the students need to convey the complete meaning and the L1 is used as a writing strategy in their L2 writing tasks (Kim & Yoon, 2014). They found that lower level students used their L1 more than the advanced students, an evident pitfall caused by several factors such as lack of vocabulary acquisition and interest
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