EXPLORATION IN TO TEACHING ENGLISH WRITING SKILLS THROUGH FREIREAN GENERATIVE THEME APPROACH: A CASE STUDY IN JIGJIGA UNIVERSITY SECOND YEAR ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS OF 2020/2021 ACADEMIC YEAR

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