Effectiveness of using newspapers to improve students vocabulary in essay writing among form three students

Abstract

Vocabulary learning is one of the major challenges that second language learners’ face during the process of learning a language. In Malaysia, many students have difficulty in writing due to the lack of vocabulary. Thus, this study seeks to investigate whether the use of newspapers can help to enhance student’s vocabulary to improve their essay writing. Twenty Form Three students from a secondary school were selected for this study to seek the effectiveness of using newspapers to teach vocabulary to improve student’s essay writing. This study is a quasi-experimental design. For the purpose of this study, two sets of instruments were used to gather the data. The first was a pre-test and a post-test of writing an essay and the second was an interview to seek student’s opinion regarding the use of newspaper to teach vocabulary to improve their essay writing. For the intervention, six treatments were administered. They consists of a rational cloze passage, matching words to its meaning, building words at sentence level and constructing sentences at paragraph level. After the intervention, students sat for the post test of writing an essay. The results were then computed using SPSS. The findings of the study showed positive results of employing newspapers to teach vocabulary when students showed improvement for their essays in the post-test. Furthermore, the vocabulary learning strategies have also helped the students to acquire vocabulary from the newspapers efficiently. Lastly, the findings from the interview showed that students enjoyed learning vocabularies from the two newspaper articles because it had brought benefits when they could the use lexical words in the right context from the newspaper articles for the post test.