| dc.description.abstract | Lack of interest and motivation on writing
activities can be noticed among undergraduates, and
it hinders the development of their writing skills. The
focus of this study is to explore the effectiveness of the
use of visual spatial intelligence based activities to
motivate undergraduates to develop writing skills. The
participants of this study included 39 undergraduates
selected randomly. A pre-test was conducted to measure
the students` existing proficiency of essay writing skills.
Among the 39 students, 54% earned less than 09 marks
out of 20. Most of the students` essays did not have a
clear introduction. Further, other common planning and
structure errors include poor structure with little or no
linking expressions, weak or non-existent topic sentence,
the absence of examples to support the main idea. In
addition, lack of motivation to complete the given writing
task was also observed. As a remedy an intervention
was designed including visual spatial intelligence based
writing activities which were different from traditional
lecturing. To measure the effectiveness of the intervention,
a post-test was conducted. The results appeared positive
in various aspects. The statistical analysis of students` pre
and post test marks showed that there was a significant
difference between the mean scores of the pre-test (M=
9.833, SD= 2.3657) and the mean score of the posttest (M= 15.08, SD= 1.620), t (38) = (-20.663, P = .00
< .05 (two tailed). The post-test results indicated that
visual spatial intelligence based essay writing activities
were effective in developing the undergraduates` essay
writing skills. Further, the students were enthusiastic in
completing the given essay writing tasks due to visual
prompts, which led them to conduct research on the given
topic, brainstorm and write rich contents in their essays.
This study shows that using visual spatial intelligencebased teaching techniques stimulate thinking ability,
which enhances students` performance in essay writing.
Visual-spatial intelligence-based teaching techniques can
be easily applied in the English language classrooms in
which students are demotivated. | en_US |
