Google Docs: Step by Step Sentence Construction for Primary School Marginal Passing Rate Pupils

Abstract

Writing is a form of communication to enable students to express their feelings and ideas in a constructed text. However, pupils are showing least interest to express their ideas in writing due to the non-contextualized materials and the traditional approach used in classroom. In order to arouse pupils' interest in writing, technology will be a tool for the teachers to achieve their goals. Google Docs, a free web-based platform, allows collaborative writing and cooperative learning to take place. This collaborative platform would gain pupils' understanding about the writing task and increase their interest in accomplishing the writing tasks. It also allows teachers to evaluate pupils' feedbacks and correspondingly for pupils to review on their peers' work. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of using Google Docs as a tool to carry out the 4-step sentence construction activities, which leads pupils progressively to expand their note from a word to a complete sentence based on the given title. It is specifically designed for the primary school pupils with marginal passing rate, which are categorised as the pupils with marginal passing grades. An action research based on Kemmis and Mc Tagart model was carried out with 30 GALUS pupils by gathering documents, survey questionnaires , interviews and assessments. The findings showed increase of 16 percent in the sentence construction skills among the pupils via the 4-step sentence construction activities conducted in Google Docs. The results also show that this approach clearly promotes the participation of pupils in writing activities. In conclusion, the 4-step sentence construction activities are effective in teaching sentence construction.