Introduction
The purpose of learning a language is to be able to communicate through the language. One of the goals of the language teaching and learning is to improve the learners to be active in communication in the written and spoken form. To accomplish the aim, the language teaching and learning should be focused on developing the learners’ four language skills i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing. In this research context, the language to learn is English. Hence, English teaching and learning should be focused on developing English language skills of the students.
English language skills mean the development of the main parts or elements of the language which are speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Each language subject or area has different educational tools that are likely suited with it. The use of several technical tools has a significant effect on the learning process of each area of the language (Sharma, 2009). English language skills are classified as input skills and output skills as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1.English language skills
The success of developing English language skills depends on the English teacher, the students, the materials, classroom management, the teaching techniques and method, and the facilities. However, those elements that influence English teaching and learning are not always as they are expected. It is as what happened in some of our middle school classes.
Writing, like all other aspects of language, is communicative. In real life, we may write e-mails, lists, notes, cover letters, reports, curricula, assignments, or essays. Some of us write articles or work on blogs, forums and websites. All of these writing tasks have a communicative purpose and a target audience. In the English language classroom, writing often lacks that communicative purpose.
One of the biggest challenges teachers have faced in the classroom has to do with writing. Writing can be a challenging skill for pupils to learn. By its nature, writing is often a solo activity, done silently, involving effort and taking a lot of time.
Usually young learners do not want to write, because they have less been encouraged to do it or to enjoy it. Most people today are less encouraged or engaged to write anything of any length in their daily lives, or anything using a pen and paper this is due to many constraints except the use of their phone. The students who have difficulties in learning English do not have high motivation in learning it. The students, then, become easy to feel bored. The low motivation of some students and their boredom lead the occurrence of other problems, i.e. noisiness and unfocused learning. The students with higher level of English learning tend to be dominant in the learning activities.
The dominance of the higher level students also give contribution to the low of motivation for some students. Those learners with the low self-esteem will be more unmotivated to learn English. Therefore their involvement and curiosity in English learning activities will not be improved. Some learners also have mindset that English is not important because English won’t be used by them in their daily life. Therefore they are not enthusiastic in learning English. Out of this mind set, the students who have low self-esteem also choose to ignore learning English more than what they learn in their English class.
When learners have difficulties to reach a good result on their writing during their first school grade it gives effect on their writing skills in their higher grade. Their writing achievements are far from being satisfactory. They could not attain the basic competence of writing skills. It is shown through many errors they made related to spelling, punctuation, grammatical errors, word choice, and cohesion while they are asked to make a writing assignment.
I.1. IDENTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM
Based on our observation in the Middle school classes through an investigation we made, we noticed some problems related to the learners and the way they are taught.
Our pupils in language schools are nowadays facing difficulties in writing skills in their written English. That’s to mean a low perceived word ratio, a considerable phonemic mistakes and a weak memorization reach.
The first problem deals with the young learners. The problem includes the learners ‘motivation and boredom. When they have difficulties in learning English learners do not have high motivation in learning it, then they become easy to feel bored. This problem causes other problems that are noisy learners and unfocused learning. Learners are rarely engaged in some writing process, their attention will be distracted by other things. They prefer chatting with their friends to paying attention the English lesson. The difficulties themselves include lack of vocabularies and lack of knowledge to arrange random words into a good sentence then into a good paragraph. Their knowledge of parts of speech, content words, and function words lack. Their spelling is also quite bad.
The second problem deals with the teaching method. The teaching method is less attractive, some learners feel sleepy while the English teacher is giving explanations. Instead of giving authentic materials and games, the English teaching is a textbook method. Therefore, the learning process is very hectic.
I.2. LIMITATION OF THE PROBLEM
Based on the identification of the above problematic, the researcher will limit the problems in this research with the aim to attain the goal of the research. The writer will only focus on the use of videos as media and work group writing tasks to improve young learners’ writing skills level at the second class middle school in CEM/ Djeffel Mohamed/ khenchela during the academic year 2016/ 2017.
So what can we do to help our middle school pupils retain their early interest in writing, while they develop skills and confidence?
Writing in any language can be so much fun, there are ways to make the writing we do with learners more communicative and pleasurable.
The teacher must find out an interesting method or visual aid to teach writing, so he or she can make the students interested in writing class. In addition, videos, nowadays, are an interesting teaching medium which students are familiar with. They can download any videos they want in the internet. They can search some music videos, manual user guide videos, recipes videos, body exercise videos and many other videos. Besides its familiarity with students’ life, there are some benefits which students can gain. They can learn some things that cannot be learnt through pictures and other media such as gestures and facial expression in a conversation. They also can learn cultural awareness through videos. Because of videos’ enjoyableness or pleasantness and the benefits which cannot be gotten by other media, they will be more motivated and more interested in learning English. Furthermore, the students are more motivated if the researcher teaches them through videos. Therefore, we believe that videos can be an effective medium to teach English. To raise the student’ confidence in doing their assignment, to make the students to learn more deeply, and to bridge the heterogeneous of students’ level, the researcher believes that focused-listing and cooperative writing technique will help them. Cooperative writing will make the students learn through their own friends who are in higher level and give them the opportunity to socialize and become more confident
I.3. FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM
Based on the background and limitation of the problem, the problems will be formulated in this research as this following question:
‘Are there any statistically significant differences in the number of perceived
words between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups?’.
To respond to this question we suppose that:
Learners need first a basic foundation and understanding of the spoken language in order to be able to write in English. For example, they need to know how to identify and talk about materialized objects and people in English language in order to write something about them.
Age plays a crucial role in what we teach and how we teach it. A young learner class is different from an adult or teenager class in terms of the learner’s needs, the language competencies emphasized, and the cognitive skills developed.
We can resume this through the following hypotheses:
I.4. HYPOTHESES OF THE STUDY
1. The audiovisual documents integrated as Instructional tool will significantly improve the performance of the second year pupils in writing skills.
2. Video clips might be used as an ice breaker, to turn classroom into an enjoyable atmosphere installing motivation and interest among young learners.
I.5. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
In relation to the formulation of the problems, this research is aimed at improving the students’ writing skills at the second class middle school using video tutorials.
I.6. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE THESIS
This research will be done to find out to what extent to which videos improve the students’ writing ability in the second class middle school; hence, the result of the research is expected to be important in giving information to the people who are concerned with English teaching and learning.
This research can be used as a brief explanation and an example for action researches and researches in the topic of videos as an audio-visual aid for teaching
I.7.RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
I.7.1. Population/Sampling
The study was restricted to a population of the Second year classes /middle school College (CEM) of Chami Mohamed located at Khenchela city /Algeria.
The representative sampling of this population was randomly selected from one class chosen among the four existing ones belonging to the defined CEM.
It consisted of 36 young students divided separately into two groups of 18 participants; however, the groups are chosen and assigned out of convenience rather than through randomization.
Participants who would be under our treatment are named Experimental group; those who did not would be our control (or reference) group. Their average age was about twelve years (12).They were boys and girls. These young learners mostly came from working class families. Their English classes were their only opportunities to be exposed to the English language. They are studying English for the first time .They sat in rows in normal classroom setting.
I.7.2.The corpus
The corpus of study is a set of video tutorials: some video clips about tales, English grammar , pronunciation and vocabulary. These video tutorials are selected in accordance with the fixed academic program of the second class /Algerian Middle School.
I.7.3. Study duration
Our study was carried out in the CEM Chami Mohamed/ khenchela during the period of second half of January 2017 to the first half of April 2017.
I.7.4. Method of investigation and variables
To answer the research questions ,we have opted for the quasi-experimental design (see appendix 11) as a research methodology and we aimed to investigate the impact of classroom animated courses and activities on second year middle school learners’ writing skill.
Hatch and Farhady (1982: 24) state that quasi experimental method is practical compromise between true experimentation and the nature of human language behaviour which is being investigated.
I.7.4.1. Quasi-experimental study
A quasi-experimental study is a type of evaluation which aims to determine whether a program or intervention has the intended effect on a study’s participants. The most common quasi-experimental design is the Comparison Group Pre-test/Post-test Design. This design is the same as the classic controlled experimental design except that the subjects cannot be randomly assigned to either the experimental or the control group, or the researcher cannot control which group will get the treatment.
I.7.4.2.Experimental method and variables
In this study we have opted for the experimental design (pre-test, treatment, post-test) to measure the effectiveness of the video tutorials (classroom animated courses and activities), on writing skills of the second year middle school learners.
Participants were given a test both before and after the experiment so as to test the effect of the video tutorials on their writing skills so:
‘ The video tutorials were set as the independent variable and
‘ Writing skills in English were the dependent variable.
This method was based, at the end of the experiment, on a tests comparison between both control group and experimental group.
I.7.5. Data processing
I.7.5.1. Method of reporting the result
The researcher will apply statistical and non-statistical analysis to report the result of the students’ achievement in writing. Principally the procedure of reporting the result will fulfill at least two criteria:
1. The report readers’ know or understand what the aim of the report is. It means that the readers can interpret the report properly.
2. The report will be objective. It means that the report describe the real condition of the research.
The procedure, the type, or the technique in reporting the result will be in various ways, such as tables, statistically data, description, etc. the report will also depict the students’ achievement in writing
I.7.5.2. Data collection instrument
To obtain the data for answering the research questions, two kinds of instrument were used:
‘ Qualitative data are the description of the events during the action, classroom observation listed on the observation grid( see appendies 3,2,’,7).
‘ Quantitative data are the students’ writing task evaluated through written tests and recorded in tables( see chapter4).
I.7.5.3. Data evaluating ( students writing)
Evaluating the students’ work is a step to obtain quantitative information from each student. Student’s writing skills were evaluated through some specific implemented tests. For this purpose, the experimental instrument used in this study to collect the desired data was the classroom ‘ Pre-Test ‘and ‘Post-Test’.
Through evaluating, the results of the students’ work will be useful to depict students’ level of writing achievement. The purpose of the research is to measure the students’ proficiency and statistically interpret the findings.
Finally to prove the effectiveness of using audiovisual instructional documents seen as an academic support, we were aiming to improve students’ ‘ writing achievement and their ability in writing process through an evaluation made by the researcher under the eye of the teacher of the English at the end of the conducted experiment.
I.7.5.4. Data evaluating system
One of the ways to score or to evaluate the students’ achievement in writing is rating scale. In using rating scale, the scorer can make a rank order of the results of the students’ work, based on a given items to know which students have the high scores and which have the lowest scores.It means whether the experimental group gets high score in terms of writing improvement.
Therefore we had opted for the conventional academic grading system which is based mostly on a 20-point grading scale:
‘ 16’20: very good (tr”s bien: TB)
‘ 14’15.9: good (bien: B)
‘ 12’13.9: satisfactory (assez bien: AB)
‘ 10’11.9: correct (passable; not an official grade)
‘ 0’9.9: fail (insuffisant)
The following scheme of rating scale is used to measure the students’ achievement in their written product (table.1).
Table1. Rating scale grid
Items Scoring
Mark scale Observation
Question 1 10/10
Question 2 6/6
Question 3 4/4
Total 20/20
I.8. STRUCTURE OF THE RESEARCH
The work plan was set as following:
Chapter one:
Is a General Introduction where we have stated the research problem, the research questions, the hypotheses, the chosen research methodology, sampling and data gathering tools.
Chapter Two:
An overview on the writing issue was given in this chapter: what is writing and writing skills. In the education field some writing disabilities besides the activities related to the process of writing are also focused.
Chapter Three:
In this chapter some lights are projected on the strategy of learning and teaching English under the use of modern technologies; the media in english language teaching, the teaching/ learning through visual aids such as video tutorials, and how videos supporting pedagogical documents are extracted.
Chapter four:
Was left to the Field Part based on the practical issue.
In this chapter all sequences of our field work we have set:
the study procedure under the experimental design;
kinds of video courses we have chosen for the teaching/learning process. Data collection instruments and the data analysis.
The interpreted findings were synthesized in order to prove our previous set hypotheses.
I.9.GENERAL CONCLUSION
As an end of our experiment, a general conclusion was given besides some suggestions in the purpose to be taken for any further considerations.
References
All references and documentation sources supporting this study were reported in a listed at the end of this research paper.
APPENDICES’