Cooperative and Individual Reading: The Effect on Writing Fluency and Accuracy
Cooperative and Individual Reading: The Effect on Writing Fluency and Accuracy
Keywords: Cooperative learning, directed Reading, writing fluency and accuracy, reading-writing connection, analytic scoring, T-Unit count
Touran Ahour
Islamic Azad University (Tabriz Branch), Iran
Jayakaran Mukundan and Shameem Rafik-Galea
University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Bio Data
Touran Ahour is an Assistant Professor and academic staff member at the Department of English, Faculty of Persian literature and Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz branch, Iran. She has received her PhD degree in TESL from the Universiti Putra Malaysia. She has published several books and articles. Her research interests include writing assessment, reading-writing connections, syllabus design, materials evaluation and ELT issues.
Jayakaran Mukundan is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Educational Studies, Universiti Putra Malaysia. He has published widely in two areas, the Teaching of Writing and ELT Materials. He is Visiting Fellow at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, Visiting Professor at Management and Science University, Malaysia and Director of the Extensive Reading Foundation Board. His areas of interest include ESL writing and ELT material development and evaluation.
Shameem Rafik-Galea is an Assoc. Professor at the Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) where she was the head of the English department for 4 years. She is currently the Director of the Office of Marketing and Communications, UPM. Her research interest includes applied linguistics and professional practices, English for specific purposes, sociolinguistics and ELT materials.
This study aims to find out the effect of Cooperative Directed Reading on the writing performance of ESL undergraduate students compared to Directed Reading without Cooperation and no treatment. A quasi-experimental research with the non-equivalent pretest-posttest control group design was used. The students of three intact expository writing classes were employed as the sample of the study from the Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The pretest-posttest essay writings of the students were collected on two comparable cause and effect prompts in two conditions. One was thematically related to their reading topics while the other was not. The writing samples were rated through an analytic scoring scale, and T-unit counts. The results of the multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) revealed better performances of the Cooperative Directed Reading group in writing fluency, writing accuracy, Mean T-Unit Length, and Mean Error-Free T-Unit Length than Directed Reading without Cooperation group compared to the No Treatment group in both conditions of the study. The findings verified the importance of using the underlying principles of cooperative learning theory and indirect model of reading for writing as one of the models of reading-writing connection theories. The implications and recommendations are presented.
Category: Main Editions, Volume 14 Issue 1
