Using Visual Spatial Intelligence Based Activities to Develop Writing Skills

Abstract

Lack of interest and motivation on writing activities can be noticed among undergraduates, and it hinders the development of their writing skills. The focus of this study is to explore the effectiveness of the use of visual spatial intelligence based activities to motivate undergraduates to develop writing skills. The participants of this study included 39 undergraduates selected randomly. A pre-test was conducted to measure the students` existing proficiency of essay writing skills. Among the 39 students, 54% earned less than 09 marks out of 20. Most of the students` essays did not have a clear introduction. Further, other common planning and structure errors include poor structure with little or no linking expressions, weak or non-existent topic sentence, the absence of examples to support the main idea. In addition, lack of motivation to complete the given writing task was also observed. As a remedy an intervention was designed including visual spatial intelligence based writing activities which were different from traditional lecturing. To measure the effectiveness of the intervention, a post-test was conducted. The results appeared positive in various aspects. The statistical analysis of students` pre and post test marks showed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of the pre-test (M= 9.833, SD= 2.3657) and the mean score of the posttest (M= 15.08, SD= 1.620), t (38) = (-20.663, P = .00 < .05 (two tailed). The post-test results indicated that visual spatial intelligence based essay writing activities were effective in developing the undergraduates` essay writing skills. Further, the students were enthusiastic in completing the given essay writing tasks due to visual prompts, which led them to conduct research on the given topic, brainstorm and write rich contents in their essays. This study shows that using visual spatial intelligencebased teaching techniques stimulate thinking ability, which enhances students` performance in essay writing. Visual-spatial intelligence-based teaching techniques can be easily applied in the English language classrooms in which students are demotivated.