The Effe Ctiveness of Oral Preparation as Complired With Other Metliods of Teaching The Writing Skill
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Date
1990-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study way designed to examine the effectiveness
of oral preparation as compared with the incidental method
of teaching the writing skill. Two groups of freshmen in
the Departments of Chemistry and Statistics (Addis Ababa
University) were randomly selected and taught Personal
letter writing and Report writing techniques.
The students in the former department were divided
into smaller conversational units and did all the writing
assignments in groups. The other group of freshman
students carried out the tasks individually as practised
in Freshman English courses.
After each mode of writing had been practised for
two weeks, 8 composition test was administered to the
subjects in identical situations for both groups. The
writing samples were then analysed and compared in terms of
the mean -T-unit length index which is recognised as a
valid measure of syntactic maturity.
The results indicated that the learners in the study
group were producing T-uhits which were consistently, but
not markedly longer than those written by the members of
the control group.
The data further ahowed that the average mean T-unit
length output of the freshman students whose writings were
considered in this study was exteremly low by both native
and ESL standards. In the literature, for example, the mean
T-unit length produced by a typical fourth grade writer on
a free writing task was reported as 11.3 words, while the
score for the freshmen sampled in the present study was
generally below 11 words per T-unit.
Techniques of teaching which were established in
research as the most effective procedures for enhancing the
syntactic fluency of writers have been suggested as possible
solutions.
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Oral Preparation