Effects of process and product approaches to teaching english language writing skills on student performance within selected secondary schools in Kenya

Abstract

Effective mastery of writing skills enhances academic performance for all subjects in the school curriculum. The process approach to writing stresses on the process that writers go through when composing texts, whereas the product approach focuses on the end result of the learning process. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of process and product approaches to teaching English language writing skills on student performance within selected secondary schools in Kenya. The study was guided by the following objectives: to determine the students’ performance in the writing test before and after instruction using the process approach to writing skills; to determine the students’ performance in the writing test before and after instruction using the product approach; and to compare the effects of process and product approaches to writing skills on students’ performance in the writing test in English language within selected secondary schools in Kenya. This study was anchored on the Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory proposed by Michael Halliday. This study employed a quantitative research approach, and used a Quasi-experimental research design that adopted the Solomon four group designs involving the random assignment of participants to four groups. The research population comprised all form three students and experienced teachers of English language in public Extra County single sex secondary schools in the western region of Kenya which comprised; Kakamega, Bungoma, Vihiga, Busia, Uasin Gishu and Transnzoia counties. The sample for the study comprised 438 Form three students from 8 public Extra County single sex secondary schools selected through simple random sampling and 4 teachers of English language purposively selected from the 6 counties. There were 2 cohorts of secondary schools: cohort 1 had 4 schools for process approach, and cohort 2 had 4 schools for product approach. In each cohort, the 4 schools were randomly assigned treatment and control conditions as intact groups. A written task and lesson observation of 4 teachers of English was used to collect data which was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics that included t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Data analysis revealed that the process approach to writing skills had a significant effect on students’ performance in the writing test (t = .000, p< 0.05), whereas the product approach to writing skills had no significant effect on students’ performance in the writing test (t = 0.115, p> 0.05), and there was a significant difference between the process and product approaches to writing skills on students’ performance where process experimental groups had a substantial increase in posttest measures (F(3.228)= 43.262, p < 0.05) compared to the product experimental groups that had none (F(3.202) = 0.862, p > 0.05). The findings revealed that students who were taught writing skills using the process approach significantly performed better than those students who were taught using the product approach. Based on the findings, it was recommended that teachers of English language should adopt the process approach to writing instruction in their classrooms to drive students towards peak writing performance. English language curriculum developers should allocate more time for teaching English language in secondary schools in Kenya to facilitate the use of process approach to improve students writing skills.