Teaching the Writing of English: Exploring the Impact of Process Approach on the Undergraduate Students of Shah Abdul Latif University Khairpur

Abstract

The importance of English Language teaching in Pakistan is gaining increasing popularity. Apart from the fact that there is a great dearth of research in ELT in Pakistan and that there are no studies existing in Pakistan about the use of process based method of teaching writing at undergraduates level, one importance of this study lies in the fact that without improving upon the pedagogical trends, the writing efficiency of the students can not be developed. This study was designed to explore the impact of process based teaching of writing on the writing performance of undergraduates of Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur. The study focused on the performance and perception of two classes of students at two different stages of the investigation. Participants of one class Experimental Class (EC) received the treatment in the form of new process based method of teaching writing and the other group Control Class (CC) was taught by the traditional method of teaching writing. The data collection tools used in this study was questionnaires, writing tests, document analysis and a checklist for classroom observation. The subjects of this study included 48 students from experimental class and 38 students from control class for perception data, and as subset of 20 participants from each group formed the sample for the product data. 10 teachers of English also took part in this study. Being experimental and comparative in nature, simple statistical percentages for perception data and correlated t- test was used to analyze the perception and the product data respectively. The study revealed that there is highly significant difference between the writing performance of the participants in the experimental class and the control class. The results of control class showed that the students were very passive during the process of learning writing and teacher focused more on grammatical structures, reproduction and writing summaries than on actual writing. Writing as a process was totally ignored in this class. Moreover, students of control class showed great dissatisfaction about teaching methodology and about their writing efficiency. But the experimental class in the post process teaching investigation showed great change in their perception and level of performance, which obviously indicated that the methodology used in the experimental group was more effective in addressing the needs and improving the efficiency of the students. They can write better paragraphs and essays than before. Moreover the classroom observation analysis supported the findings elicited from other data sets. The study found that there is great need for teachers to improve their teaching practice, keep themselves abreast with the latest techniques of teaching writing and extend learning freedom to students by ensuring their participation in the teaching and learning process. Finally, the study concludes that students’ writing skills can only be developed by enough classroom practice in writing and effective teaching methodology.