Abstract:
his thesis was an exploration in to teaching writing skills through Paulo Freire’s generative
theme approach. The main purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the
generative theme approach was being implemented in advance writing classes at Jigjiga
University second year students. The study attempted to find out factors that hinder students’
attitude, desire, and motivation towards writing and the strategies teachers use to overcome
them. To achieve the objectives of this research descriptive research design is used. This helped
the researcher to employ at both mixed methods of data collection. The participants of the study
were 3 teachers who were selected using purposive sampling and 29 students were selected by
simple random sampling. As a result, the instructor preferred to use generative theme approach
in the classroom. Students’ lack of appetite towards the writing topics led them not to produce
a meaningful writing. This in turn made it difficult to know students’ perceptions of theme
generative approach. The findings of the study shows the instructors had favorable perceptions
about the contribution of theme generative writing to the development of students’ writing
ability, but they lacked confidence to implement theme generating writing because of their
students’ poor writing. Therefore, the students were given awareness raising training on how
to do their writing using topics of interest. In addition to this, the untrained students had no
experience about theme generating writing. As a result, they could not tell whether the theme
generating writing helped them to improve their writing abilities. The students wrongly
perceived theme generative writing as exercising writing through discrete language elements.
The conclusion made from the study is that the trained students practiced writing relatively more
than the inexperienced students because of their awareness and improved perceptions about
generative theme approach implementation in writing
