CAN CONFERENCES AND MODELLING STRATEGIES IMPROVE STUDENTS’ INTEREST AND ACHIEVEMENT IN ESSAY WRITING?

Titus Terver Udu, Naomi James Gwang

Abstract


The study reported here was on the effects of writing conference and teacher modelling strategies on Senior School Two (SS2) students' interest and achievement in essay writing. The study used quasi experimental design of the non equivalent pre-test/post-test experimental-control group subtype. From a population of 9,244 senior secondary students in 5 Local Government (LGAs) of Central Education Zone of Plateau State, a sample of 95 students was selected from two intact classes using a multi-stage sampling technique. One of the sampled classes formed Experimental Group One while the other formed Experimental Group Two for an experiment that lasted for a duration of six weeks. The study was guided by two research questions and two hypotheses. Two instruments namely Writing Achievement Test (WAT) and Questionnaire on Students’ Interest in Essay writing (QSIEW) were used for data collection.. Data collected were analysed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) to test the hypotheses. Findings revealed that both strategies enhanced students’ achievement in essay writing. However, students taught essay writing using writing conference strategy outperformed their counterparts taught using teachers’ modelling in assigned writing tasks and tested in the writing achievement test. The finding further indicated that students taught via conference strategy gained significantly higher mean interest rating than those taught using teacher modelling strategy. Based on the findings, the study recommended that combining writing conferencing and modelling strategies in the teaching of essay writing could bring about increased interest in writing and better writing outcomes among secondary school students.

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writing, conferencing, modelling, interest, achievement, English

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejfl.v5i2.3289

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