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S oc Muluneh, Arts Social Sci J 2018, 9:3

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DOI: 10.4172/2151-6200.1000351
Arts and

Arts and Social Sciences Journal

ISSN: 2151-6200 Journal

Research Article Open Access

Improving Students’ Paragraph Writing Skill through Task-Based

Approach
Tegbar Kibret Muluneh*
Department of Social Science, Ambo University, Ethiopia

Abstract
The main objective of this study was to improving students’ paragraph writing skill through task-based approach
teaching methodology. To this end, the researcher made a quantitative research design to investigate the issue.
To collect the necessary data for the study, experiment was employed as the main data collecting tool. Then, the
data was analyzed using quantitative approaches. Accordingly, the researcher used different tables which shows
the students’ pre-test and post-test results and changed into percentage. The study revealed that the students’
paragraph writing skill can develop by using task-based approach teaching methodology.

Keywords: Task based; Paragraph; Unity; Coherence language and has been serving as a medium of instruction. Writing skill
which is one of the four major language skills has been given emphasis
Introduction based on the prescribed syllabus design by Ministry of Education. The
Writing is one of the four basic skills in English language. Smith and emphasis has been described or shown by the time or period allotment
Hopfield argue that writing is the most demanding of others language given to each language skill and linguistic item. Comparatively, the
skills. Therefore, writing is very important for academic success at writing tasks cover many of the periods.
university and work place. Therefore, students have to have the skills of On the other hand, regardless of the fact that the skill is taught and
how to create a basic unit of writing at different level. practiced in secondary and tertiary levels, the investigator has come
In addition, writing is a developmental process that can be to observe that many students often face difficulty towards expressing
observed and encouraged. It takes time for students to achieve their ideas, opinions and feelings appropriately in written forms.
competency as they move through characteristic stages from scribbling Moreover, EFL teachers teaching basic writing skills course to
to conventional spelling. Zamel points out that the process of writing is a freshman students at Ambo University complain that their students
non-linear, exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discover are weak in writing an effective paragraph. This problem is clearly
and reformulate their ideas as they attempt to approximate meaning. To observed in other courses which require assignments and examinations
this effect, students will be asked to revise their drafts on the basis of their in written English. There is also a consensus among teachers that
teacher comments as well as peers` comments because revision is a process paragraph writing skills remain poor even if students are instructed
in which ideas get re-organized and re-formulated. Writing success can be how to write it. The method of instruction is partly responsible for
achieved when writing is viewed as a recursive process that includes students’ success or failure in writing and teachers need to try adopting
forming intentions, composing drafting publication and response. active learning techniques.
Langan and Gunning agreed that writing is an important when As an action teaching the researcher agreed to conduct this action
they stated both more practice and use than talk. In addition, some research on one of freshman basic writing skills classrooms at Ambo
scholars have stated different views on writing [1,2]. For instance, University considering its significance to improve paragraph writing
Pearsall and Cunningham and Emmons advocated that writing is skills of students.
definitely requiring hard work. However, Ramie’s and Alamirew G/
Mariam, reveal the existence of problems of writing or yet it remains It is admitted that creating a Task based writing classroom can
the most difficult skill lacked a considerable concern in the teaching of be a rewarding opportunity but it is not without its challenges and
the language achievement [3-5]. dilemmas. EFL teachers commonly experience less interactive task
groups in basic writing skills classrooms. This is true especially when
In other words, writing is an activity which should be done with a teacher seeks feedback from group activities in classrooms. Our
great care and should be thought to communicate with a reader action research team assumed that the challenges and complexity of
effectively. These imply that writing is a difficult skill which needs to be managing tasks in writing classrooms can be minimized and paragraph
thoroughly practiced. The ability to write well is not a naturally acquired
skill. According to Grebe and Kaplan [6] writing is a technology assist
of skills which must be practiced through experience.
*Corresponding author: Tegbar Kibret Muluneh, Department of Social Science,
Writing daily and working recursively through the stages of writing Ambo University, Ethiopia, Tel: +251 974107012; E-mail: [email protected]
will increase students` skill as writers. To this end teachers` dedication,
commitment, relationship with individual students, their skills in Received December 30, 2017; Accepted March 21, 2018; Published March 28,
2018
motivating pupils and managing classrooms becomes resolutely
important. The teacher role in teaching of writing is not the assessment Citation: Muluneh TK (2018) Improving Students’ Paragraph Writing Skill through
Task-Based Approach. Arts Social Sci J 9: 351. doi: 10.4172/2151-6200.1000351
of students writing but that of a coach, a facilitator and a supporter.
Copyright: © 2018 Muluneh TK. This is an open-access article distributed under
The Problem the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and
In Ethiopian schools, English language has been taught as a foreign source are credited.

Arts Social Sci J, an open access journal Volume 9 • Issue 3 • 1000351

ISSN: 2151-6200
Citation: Muluneh TK (2018) Improving Students’ Paragraph Writing Skill through Task-Based Approach. Arts Social Sci J 9: 351. doi: 10.4172/2151-
6200.1000351

Page 2 of 4

writing skills of our students can be improved through the adoption of Research Design
task based active learning techniques and strategies.
Experimental research design sounds more appropriate for the
Hence, the purpose of this study was investigating the extent that topic in focus. Quantitative analysis was employed for analysing the
task-based strategies improve EFL learners’ paragraph writing skills data obtained from pre and post-tests.
among Ambo University 1st Year Linguistics Students.
Data collection tools
The main purpose of this study is to examine the effect of task based
writing on the improvement of students’ paragraph writing skills. More To evaluate the effectiveness of task based learning in supporting
specifically, the study has the following objectives: teaching of writing, the researcher developed a pre-test to assess
students’ level in the two groups at the beginning of the course, and
• Helping students to write a well unified paragraph. to indicate that any significant differences at the end of the course in
• Assisting them to put ideas in a coherent way. favour of the experimental group are due to adopting blended learning
[14,15]. Another tool was the unified post-test which was developed
• Enabling the students to connect ideas by using transitional by the researchers in accordance with a writing rubric containing the
words and conjunctions. following domains of evaluation: unity, cohesion, ordering, coherence,
and the use of conjunctions.
Task-based Approach in Teaching Writing
As for the validity of the post test, the three instructors participated
The idea of getting learners to acquire English through Task-Based
in designing an outline of a paragraph and students were instructed
Strategies, which refers to Task-Based Instruction (TBI) was developed
develop it into a complete paragraph. The instructors agreed on the
in India by Prabhu in the 1980s. His approach was a reaction both
validity of the post-test since it measured the skills focused up on in the
against the traditional form of English as a foreign language (EFL)
study [16]. The nature of the post-test was comparable to that of the
used in India and against the type of communicative language teaching
pretest. One of the researchers was the instructor of the experimental
which was practiced there. Prabhu’s project, in India, is mostly calling
and control groups and the scorer of the pre-test and post-test
attention to the cognitive processes entailed by tasks. He talks about
paragraphs.
tasks involving ‘some processes of thought’. However, according to
Nunan, task-based instruction is a way of designing teaching syllabuses Procedures of the Study
which consists of a set of communicative tasks, and a way to involve
learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in In order to gather data for this study, the students were first
the target language [7]. stratified into two groups based on their preliminary test results and
sex groups to control the impacts of other factors. Then, the groups
Moreover, Communicative language teaching (CLT) came up with were assigned to experimental and controlled group.
a perception of language learning which regards language as ‘more
than simply a system of rules’ [7-9]. Brown defines the principles of The data were gathered from all the students using test. The
CLT as follows: preliminary test was administered to all the students to gather the
baseline data. After collecting the baseline data, a series of weekly
1. Classroom goals focus on all of the components of lessons (3 weeks) was implemented for the experimental group by
communicative competence and they are not restricted to grammatical using task based learning. Finally, a post test was given for both groups
or linguistic competence. to see whether the intervention helped the learners to achieve better
2. Language techniques are designed to engage learners in the results than its counterpart.
pragmatic, authentic, and functional use of language for meaningful
Results of the Study
purposes. Organizational language forms are not the central focus but
rather aspects of language that enable the learners to accomplish those To investigate the effectiveness of adopting task based learning in
purposes. teaching writing in English as a foreign language in higher education
and to answer the first question, the researchers calculated the
3. Fluency and accuracy are seen as complementary principles
differences in students’ achievement scores in the post tests between
underlying communicative techniques. At times fluency may have
the two groups as follows:
to take on more importance than accuracy in order to keep learners
meaningfully engaged in language use. The result of the Preliminary Test
4. In the communicative classroom, students ultimately have to The results of the data collected during the preliminary phase of
use the language, productively and receptively, in unrehearsed contexts. the action research demonstrate that the problem needs immediate
solution. Below is the performance of the control group on preliminary
Generally, the 1970s saw a world–wide shift towards teaching
test out of 10 (Tables 1 and 2).
methods that emphasized communication as the fundamental reason
for language teaching [10,11]. Later on, communication came to be As can be seen from the above tables, the average performance of
seen more in terms of processes that people use to carry out specific both the control and experimental group on the preliminary test is
tasks. Willis believes that Task-based Instruction (TBI) is a logical almost the same, i.e., 3.65 and 3.85 consecutively [17]. The range is 7
development of Communicative Language Teaching and it grows out for the control and the experimental group. In both cases, the majority
of more general notion of CLT. Thus, some syllabuses were designed of the students scored below 5 on the test. Furthermore, no one scored
around the processes or tasks that students use in the classroom 9 or 10 from both groups on the pretest (Table 3).
[12,13]. To start with, this style meant redefining what the student had
to learn in terms of communicative competence rather than linguistic Proposed Action
competence. On the basis of the preliminary test analysis made so far, the

Arts Social Sci J, an open access journal Volume 9 • Issue 3 • 1000351

ISSN: 2151-6200
Citation: Muluneh TK (2018) Improving Students’ Paragraph Writing Skill through Task-Based Approach. Arts Social Sci J 9: 351. doi: 10.4172/2151-
6200.1000351

Page 3 of 4

No Paragraph Elements Scores Total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 Unity 2 3 2 2 - 3 1 - 13
2 Putting details in Sequence 3 2 3 1 2 2 - - 13
3 Logical Ordering of Ideas - 3 3 5 - 1 - 1 13
4 Using Cohesive devices 3 - 5 1 2 - 2 - 13
5 Using Conjunctions 2 - 3 4 1 1 1 1 13
Table 1: Control group scores on preliminary test.

No Paragraph Elements Scores Total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 Unity - 3 2 3 2 2 1 - 13
2 Putting details in Sequence 2 1 4 2 1 2 1 - 13
3 Logical Ordering of Ideas 1 3 2 3 1 2 - 1 13
4 Using Cohesive devices - 2 3 1 5 1 1 - 13
5 Using Conjunctions - 3 5 2 3 - - - 13
Table 2: Experimental group performance on pre-test.

No Assessment focus Average Scores

Control group Experimental group
1 Unity 3.62 4.07
2 Coherence 3.23 3.69
3 Ordering 3.77 3.85
4 Transition 3.54 4.23
5 Conjunctions 4.08 3.38
Table 3: Average score of both groups.

following actions have been proposed to be implemented to improve assessment process so that they understood how to improve and
students’ paragraph writing skills by specifically focusing on the three become independent learners. This was done by the assumption that
qualities of paragraph: unity, coherence, and cohesion. the primary objectives of such an assessment support learning. On
1. Awareness creation on the importance of writing skills. the basis of the peer comments and the insightful feedback from the
instructor, students were given enough time to improve or even rewrite
2. Motivating students to perform better on writing tasks. their paragraphs. Finally, students were asked to make a comparison of
3. Promoting peer assessment on writing tasks. their own works among their group members and recommend one best
paragraph from their group for appraisal [19]. Students who performed
4. Designing tasks which relate to students’ real life, for example,
better from each group got privileges and appreciations from the
5. Describing about themselves, students and instructor. This created a sense of interdependence and
6. Writing about campus and dormitory life, etc. a sort of writing completion among students. This process continued
for three consecutive months and the instructor wanted to see that if
Implementation of Action students have shown some improvement on the writing areas in focus.
To this effect, they carefully prepared a writing test and administered to
The researcher scored thoroughly the performance of students on
the preliminary test. Accordingly, the needs and background of the the target students. To minimize biases and subjectivity, which are the
students have been identified and the following actions were taken inevitable drawbacks of writing tests, key answers and checklists were
to bring improvement in three major areas or qualities of paragraph set in advance and scoring was made objective as much as possible. The
writing. Therefore, the teacher conducted three months lessons to table below demonstrates the results obtained from both control and
implement the proposed actions [18]. To this end, some varied activities experimental group on post intervention test (Tables 4-6).
which have real connections to students’ life were designed. Students
were organized into individual and small groups and were given Evaluation of Action/Outcome
shared objectives. Besides, objectives of the writing tasks were clearly After intervention, the average performance of the experimental
communicated to the students. They were encouraged to make outline group on post test showed a slight improvement when compared to
on the given topics in groups before they move on to write paragraphs
the mean score on pretest, i.e, 4.26 for post-test and 3.85 for pretest.
of their own individually. The students were explicitly told the areas
However, the mean score of the controlled group showed insignificant
they need to pay attention to (unity, coherence, and cohesion) in their
individual work. After students finished their writing tasks, specific change. In other words, the discrepancy between the preliminary and
criteria against which they would assess their performance were set post-test for control group was 0.10 (3.75 mean for post-test and 3.65
by the instructors and students took sufficient time to read and give pre-test). A considerable difference was noticed between the average
constructive comments for each other. With regard to assessment, the performance of the control and experimental group on post-test (3.75
Association for Achievement and Improvement through Assessment mean for pre-test and 4.26 for post-test respectively). The difference is
(AAIA) 2006 recommends that students should be fully involved in equal to 0.51.

Arts Social Sci J, an open access journal Volume 9 • Issue 3 • 1000351

ISSN: 2151-6200
Citation: Muluneh TK (2018) Improving Students’ Paragraph Writing Skill through Task-Based Approach. Arts Social Sci J 9: 351. doi: 10.4172/2151-
6200.1000351

Page 4 of 4

No Paragraph Elements Scores Total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 Unity - 1 3 2 - 3 3 - 13
2 Putting details in Sequence 1 2 1 2 1 2 - 1 13
3 Logical Ordering of Ideas - 3 1 4 2 1 - 1 13
4 Using Cohesive devices 1 1 2 1 3 1 3 - 13
5 Using Conjunctions - 2 4 3 2 - 1 - 13
Table 4: Students’ performance on post test (control group).

No Paragraph Elements Scores Total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 Unity - 1 3 2 - 4 3 - 13
2 Putting details in Sequence 1 2 1 2 1 3 - 1 13
3 Logical Ordering of Ideas - 3 1 4 2 2 - 1 13
4 Using Cohesive devices 1 1 2 1 3 2 3 - 13
5 Using Conjunctions - 2 4 4 2 - 1 - 13
Table 5: Students’ performance on post test (experimental group).

No Assessment focus Average Scores 9. Anderson LW (1995) Document Analysis and supervision of seat work.
International Encyclopedia of teaching Teacher Education.
Control group Experimental group
1 Unity 4.46 4.92 10. Donn B (1988) Teaching writing skills, London: Long man.
2 Coherence 3.15 3.62 11. Cunningham A (1995) Choosing your work book oxford. MacMillan Publisher
3 Ordering 3.62 4.23 Ltd.
4 Transition 4.23 4.77 12. Freedman AI, Yalden PJ (1996) Learning to writing paragraph First language
5 Conjunctions 3.31 3.77 and Second language.
Table 6: Average score of both groups (post- test). 13. Al Nafiseh KI (2013) Collaborative Writing and Peer Editing in EFL Classes.
Journal of Emerging Trends in Educational Research and Policy Studies, 4:
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Arts Social Sci J, an open access journal Volume 9 • Issue 3 • 1000351

ISSN: 2151-6200