TEACHING MATERIAL PACKAGE FOR NARRATIVE WRITING

Abstract

The development of good writing abilities in English is crucial to students' educational success in Singapore. This study is specifically concerned with developing upper secondary school students' abilities to write the Narrative, a major curriculum genre. Many students, especially those who lack proficiency in English, often fail to produce satisfactory narrative essays. One of the major factors behind this failure is the lack of adequate resource materials to help students improve their narrative writing skills. This study is, thus, an attempt to redress the problem by developing a set of instructional materials which explicitly teach the schematic structure of the narrative and other effective narrative techniques. The package was developed based on the syllabus objectives and a synthesis of the genre and prose model approaches to writing. The text models used in the package were primarily short stories. The main objective of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of the package in improving students' narrative writing abilities. A secondary aim is to evaluate the effectiveness of the package with students of different proficiency levels in English The experiment was conducted with two intact secondary three Express Stream students in a government school where the standard of English was generally low. One class was the experimental group which was taught narrative writing with the package while the other class served as the control group which was not given the special treatment. The comparability of the two classes in English was established before the start of the experiment. Data for the study was gathered by means of a pre- and post-test, a specially designed scoring scheme and a student's questionnaire. The pre-test was administered to both classes a month before the actual experiment, which took six weeks, began. The post-test and questionnaire were administered at the end of the experiment, three months later. The lapse of three months was crucial as the same test was used both times. Statistical analysis of the pre- and post-test results provides strong evidence that the instructional package was effective in helping students improve their narrative writing. Another finding of the study is that the package appeared to be more effective with higher ability language students than lower ability language students. The units within the package were also not uniformly effective since certain units were more effective than others. The findings of the study clearly indicate that the package offers a practical and viable solution to the problem teachers face in helping students improve their narrative writing skills. However, they also show that the package needs to be modified in order to help lower ability language students and to make the units within the package equally effective. .