Adopting Julia Cameron's "Morning Pages" to Improve the English Writing Skills of ESL Undergraduates.

Abstract

The action research was implemented to investigate the possibility of seeking solutions to the difficulties encountered by the ESL students at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka with regard to one of the most challenging productive skills namely writing; lack of coherence and cohesion in writing, inability to construct grammatically accurate sentences, and dearth of ideas, adequate vocabulary and practice were the major obstacles that made it difficult for them to produce a good piece of writing. The practice of “Morning Pages” was thus introduced to the students with some intentional changes, instructing them to write three pages of longhand writing as a non-negotiable activity in their morning routine. Journaling prompts were also suggested in covering diverse thematic areas such as self-discovery, politics and social media. A pretest and posttest design were utilized to obtain quantitative data for the study whilst interviews and questionnaires were also administered to the students to accumulate qualitative data to explore the effectiveness of the activity. It was discovered that the specific activity has helped them expand their lexicon, use the novel vocabulary items in context, explore grammar patterns closely in attempting to construct accurate sentences, gain knowledge of diverse areas not to be devoid of ideas when journaling, and realize that writing is a desirable skill to practise to enhance their language skills. Moreover, the scores obtained for the pretest and posttest ensured the aforementioned progress gained through the consistent practice of writing “Morning Pages.”