Impact of using videos in teaching narrative writing in English primary classroom

Abstract

The art of teaching writing is never easy as many skills are tested simultaneously. With technology, the teaching of writing can be revolutionised to promote positive changes. A piece of technology that can be used is video. Video contains all the elements such as audio, colourful visuals and moving images necessary to scaffold pupils’ learning of narrative writing. Malaysian education system in teaching narrative writing has been stagnant, focusing on using black and white images since the 1980s. Thus, with this pandemic, it is the best time to venture into using videos to teach narrative writing. To add on to that, there is limited research on the application on using videos to teach narrative writing in Malaysian primary English classrooms as well as the study of perception of male and females on using videos in the classroom. Hence this study aims to investigate the impact of using videos to teach narrative writing, the significant differences in scores between male and female in using videos to teach narrative writing as well as the perception of male and female when using videos to teach narrative writing. The instruments used are test papers, real-life videos and a questionnaire. A total of 80 students who are in Year 6 from a primary school in Johor Bahru took part in this study. SPSS software was used to determine the impact of using videos in the classroom compared to traditional methods as well as to analyse the perception of male and females on the usage of videos in teaching narrative writing. The results show that students score higher marks in narrative writing when using video compared to using black and white pictures. The study also reports that there is no significant difference in scores between male and females when writing narrative writing using videos. Both male students and female students’ perception towards using videos to write narrative essay has no impact towards the test scores. This study also provided recommendations to promote usage of video in Malaysian classrooms.