Developing Learners’ Writing Performance through an Integrative Grammar Teaching Model

Abstract

Considerably, writing is a complex task that requires the integration of multiple cognitive, linguistic, and motor abilities. It involves both low-level transcription skills (handwriting, spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, and grammar) and high-level composition skills (planning, content, organisation, and revision). In this regard, second year university learners at the section of English often take a “written expression” course backed up with tutorial classes to help learners master the different writing techniques and styles. However, many learners struggle in the writing process and end up producing pieces of writing that are ineffective or even incomprehensible showing poor mastery of language usage. Most of the time, learners have good ideas and knowledge of the way paragraphs or essays should be organised. In such a case, the ineffectiveness that characterises learners’ written products is grammar- related. To account for the reasons behind these problems, we hypothesised that the currently used grammar teaching method might not be effective leading to such a shortage in learners’ knowledge and skills. As a remedy to this anomaly, we have proposed the Integrative Grammar Teaching Method (IGM) as a model of grammar teaching. The analysis and interpretation of the collected data revealed that IGM could help learners develop their writing performances. Likewise, it has confirmed that teaching grammar in the context of writing and including learners in the process of rules formation is more likely to help them use grammar correctly and appropriately in the process of writing producing more legible and correct written products. Therefore, we could conclude that the previously stated hypotheses were confirmed and the findings were supportive and positive.