Expo-writing: A Strategy to Minimize Grammatical Errors

Abstract

This study aimed to minimize grammatical errors that occurred in the Professional Writing subject of ESL learners who follow the Higher National Diploma in English (HNDE) Programme at the Sri Lanka Institute of Advanced Technological Education (SLIATE). The research was undertaken with an experimental quantitative research design. This study was carried out on 150 students comprising full-time and part-time. Students of the Department of English from one of the Advanced Technological Institutes (ATI) in SLIATE were the samples for this study. To examine the grammatical errors such as omission, addition, misformation and misordering in the subject of Professional Writing, a pre-test was administered to the samples. Expo-writing was used as a strategy for the target group. Samples were instructed to exhibit all the learning activities assigned in professional writing contexts at the Expo-writing event conducted at the department at the end of the second semester of the 2020 Academic year. To observe whether there was a statistically remarkable difference between the pre-test and post-test, a paired samples t-test was administered to the experimental groups using SPSS statistical software. As per the performance in the post-test, the results showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the post-test scores of control group (M=70.9200, SD=2.60851) and experimental group (M=79.5067, SD=4.20544) with respect to the type of treatment (t (74) = -16.072, p<.005). Therefore, it can be said that those who received instruction through expo-writing learning activities showed significantly higher performance in their writing performance than those who received the instruction in the control group since expo-writing was used as a strategy to minimize grammatical errors. In addition, when ESL learners were supposed to exhibit their art of writing to others, expo-writing created a positive competitive exposure to communicate their thoughts via a written form using the least grammatical errors. Further, learning by seeing others’ writings led ESL learners to a positive culture in improving professional writing.