The Effects of Language Supportive Pedagogy (LSP) in Students’ Writing Skills in the Entomology Course at Kotebe University of Education

Abstract

This paper reports on small-scale action research conducted with students in the final year of their degree at Kotebe University of Education. We found that students majoring in biology expressed their content knowledge in the form of lists and avoided composing coherent sentences - much less complete paragraphs. We designed an intervention that explicitly guided the students to compose short pieces of academic writing within four scientific genres: description, comparison, components, and classification. The intervention was evaluated using a pretest, posttest, and a student-focused group discussion involving around one-third of the class. The results show that after six weeks, all the students could write coherent, well-organized paragraphs using appropriate scientific language. Students attributed their improvement to the formative feedback they received throughout the six-week intervention. This small-scale study suggests that cross-curricular language support has considerable potential for developing pre-service teachers’ writing skills. However, realizing this potential requires collaboration between language and other subject teachers. We relate the findings to previous research in Tanzania, which focused on developing pre-service teachers’ pedagogic skills for supporting learners through language transition. The policy implications of using the home language as the medium of instruction in higher education institutions where English is the language of instruction should be considered for science teachers. Moreover, we concluded by arguing for a joined-up approach to teacher education for multilingual education systems and suggested some priorities for further research.