Sandra's Capstone Presentation on Improving Form 1 ESL Learners' Descriptive Writing Through the TCT

This video summarising critical points on my action research, "Improving Form 1 ESL Learners' Descriptive Writing Through the Teacher Critiquing Technique (TCT)", supervised by Associate Professor Dr Charanjit Kaur Swaran Singh, has been pre-recorded in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Education (Teaching of English as a Second Language) at Sultan Idris Education University via the Capstone Action Research (BIR3993) course for myself in batch A232.
Note: The labels for behaviourism and constructivism at 1:19 were accidentally switched around. Apologies for the information hiccough. 🙏
Research Abstract
This qualitative action research conducted in Private School X employed the Teacher Critiquing Technique (TCT) through the purposive sampling of five remedial to intermediate-level learners of two Form 1 classes. These learners demonstrated difficulty in expressing themselves verbally and in descriptive writing, making them passive and highly dependent on the teacher’s aid in their writing tasks. Thus, this study examined how the TCT impacted ESL learners’ ability to organise ideas, develop coherent arguments, and express themselves, particularly in descriptive informal email writing. This study was grounded in constructivist and behaviourist theories, emphasising active learning and the teacher’s personalised feedback in fostering learners' writing skills and critical thinking. Through an interview conducted on the researcher’s experiences, documents on the researcher’s lessons carried out, and learners’ descriptive writing work, data was collected and then analysed through thematic analysis, comparative document analysis, and the analysis of the TCT impacts on learner descriptive writing. Findings revealed that the TCT helped improve idea generation among learners, besides increasing their engagement and willingness to participate in writing tasks. However, the TCT was also found to be time-consuming, and learners still depended on the teacher’s written examples. Yet, this research highlighted the potential of the TCT in enhancing ESL learners’ writing skills, recommending that teachers integrate TCT into their feedback strategies to promote active learning and critical thinking among learners, besides providing them with personalised support while managing classroom time effectively.
Keywords: Descriptive writing, Teacher Critiquing Technique (TCT), ESL writing skills, feedback strategies, writing organisation, writing engagement
Here's the link to my full research, if you're interested!
docs.google.com/document/d/1y...

[@aireenainabahari4779]

Well done, Sandra

[@sandyichigo]

Thank you, Dr Aireen! 🥹