Improve writing skills in an integrated English language and Literature curriculum

Pereira, M. D. (2010). A literature-driven English programme's effectiveness in improving the writing skills of Grade 7 Singaporean students. English in Education, 44(3), 231-251.

Background

The researcher reported that, in Singapore schools, English Language and English Literature were taught as separate subjects. Therefore, students tended to view grammar as a set of rules to learn by rote, rather than as contextually linked to the text to give the text meaning.

Aims

This study investigated whether an integrated English Language and Literature curriculum was effective in enhancing the narrative writing skills of secondary school students in Singapore.

Sample

The participants were 950 Secondary 1 students from four secondary schools.

Method

In this integrated curriculum, the literature text was as important as the explicit teaching of skills. The literature text was used to demonstrate how vocabulary, grammar, and narrative writing techniques influenced meaning and stimulated responses in the reader. After understanding the meaning-making conventions in the model literature text, the students were asked to create their own narratives by using what they had learnt. The grammatical concepts, narrative structure and the elements of a narrative were explicitly taught. Students were shown how certain words, tenses, and sentence types created different effects on the reader. To help the students recognize the difference in the effect that each type of sentence had on the reader, the structure of the sentences in the selected literature text was altered. The students were asked to compare the altered text with the original and to note the difference in effect on the reader.

Data collected included historical academic grades, pre- and post- writing assessments, exit surveys by students in the experimental group, semi-structured interviews with teachers and small groups of students in the experimental group, classroom observations, and field notes and teachers’ written observations.

Findings

The effect size for the experimental group was larger than that of the control group for narrative writing. For the experimental group, the effect size for the boys was larger than that for the girls.

Implications

The author proposed that using an integrated English Language and Literature curriculum could be effective in enhancing the narrative writing skills of Secondary 1 students in Singapore.

Original article retrieved from Wiley Online Library.