WELCOME TO KENTERPRO:
EFFECTS OF VISUAL MATERIALS ON THE TEACHING OF ARABIC IN SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN IKEJA LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF LAGOS STATE

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

• BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Arabic is used as an international language. When someone wants to learn Arabic, they have to try to do their best to be able to understand Arabic, especially in developing the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Writing is an activity to express ideas, thoughts or even experiences in the form of paragraphs. It is not an automatic process. Writing skill involves how to write a text or essay. It means that during this activity, students play roles as active participants rather than the others. Students are hoped to know how to make a good sentence, to arrange a text and to express ideas that come from their minds.

Writing is the most powerful medium for knowledge retention and dissemination. Hence, the wise saying of the Arabic tradition (Prophet SAW) that, “The ink of the scholars is more precious than the blood of the martyrs”, and the saying of Allah the exalted on the power of the pen that:

“…Read! Your Lord is the most bountiful One, who taught by the pen, taught man what he did not know”.Q.96:1

This signifies the extent to which a good writing skill becomes necessary for perfect understanding of its content and context. Hence, Strategy of teaching is the most important factor.

According to Nation (2008) and Siahaan (2013), writing is an activity that can be usefully be prepared for by working in the other skills of listening, speaking and reading. Writing is a good support for the other three skills. At the basic level, writing is an act of committing words or ideas to som-e medium. As Richard and Renandya (2002) stated, writing is the most difficult skill for second language learners to master. The difficulty lies not only in generating and organizing ideas, but also in translating these ideas into readable text. 

Writing is difficult for students of Senior Secondary School. The difficulties are that the students cannot put their ideas in writing because they lack the ability to do so. This makes them to think that they cannot produce a written text. The visual materials are one of the solutions that can help the teachers to explain language meaning and construction. The teachers are able to cope with the problems in teaching Arabic. A visual material is an illustration that can be used as a two dimensional representation of a person, place or thing. It means that visual material is one of the media of communication that can show people, places and things that are far from us. A visual material can make anyone to get clearer ideas or information than language term. Visual material is a kind of good media, which can be used in teaching writing. The students will be more interested in learning writing if the teacher teaches writing by using visual materials. Visual material is one kind of media that is easy to find in magazines, books, newspaper or we can create it by drawing it ourselves. Visual materials are very useful media in teaching language. Because of that, they are also useful in teaching writing skills. In addition, visual materials will motivate the students to write.

In the second year of Senior Secondary School, the basic competency that should be realized in the writing aspect of the Arabic subject is that the students have ability to develop and produce written simple functional text in the descriptive text, recount text, and narrative text. In the context of this study, the writer will only focus on descriptive text. Descriptive text is one of the functional texts which is difficult enough to be learned by students. Wardiman (2008) stated, descriptive text is a text that describes the features of someone, something or a certain place. Descriptive text consists of introduction and description. Introduction is the part of paragraph that introduces the character, and description is the part of paragraph that describes the character. The students can use the simple present and adjective clause in writing descriptive text. In writing the descriptive text, students often find some difficulties. The students usually find it difficult to organize their ideas. Furthermore, many students make some mistakes and face difficulties to build and develop their imagination. Anderson and Anderson (2003) and Siahaan (2013) mentioned that descriptive text is different from information reports because they describe a specific subject rather than a general group. Furthermore, Novita (2014) stated that the purpose of descriptive text is to describe objects or person in which the writer is interested.

Based on the researcher’s experience during his teaching practice, many Senior Secondary School students were not interested in writing descriptive text because it seemed difficult for them. They did not know how to write correctly, especially in choosing a word or vocabulary to put in the sentence.

Therefore, in order to overcome the problems above, the teacher needs to find and use appropriate media to help the students in teaching writing descriptive texts. Media are the means for transmitting or delivering messages. In teaching – learning  perspective, media are used to deliver content to the learners for achieving effective instruction (Naz, 2010). In this case, the use of media in teaching – learning process is needed to attract students’ attention and to make teaching – learning activities more interesting and effective.

According to Sa’diyah (2011) and Novita (2014), the visual material can increase students’ interest and make writing activity more interesting. The visual material also enhances the students’ participation and interaction during the learning activities. Visual materials can also be used as one of the interesting means of learning to improve students’ motivation. Visual materials are instructional media. Visual materials can be guidance in writing activity (Siahaan, 2013).

In this research, the researcher uses visual materials because visual materials will help the students in exploring their ideas and motivate them in writing. As a result, the teacher needs an alternative medium that can solve the problems in writing descriptive text. Using visual materials is important in writing descriptive text because it is one of the most appropriate method that boost the students’ motivation in writing.

• STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

In native language environments, productive skills develop differently. Writing unlike speaking, involves a process of formal learning, while speaking develops naturally through a process called “acquisition” (Krashen, 1987). Although they undertake a process of formal learning of writing, most native speakers never master this skill (Nunan, 2009). In the same line, Nunan also confirms that when facing writing the “challenges for second language learners are enormous” (p. 271). In addition, the researcher dares to add, based on his own experience, that in foreign language teaching settings, the challenges for students to develop writing skills are even the most demanding but with the lowest levels of achievement.

In the educational setting where this study has been carried out, most of the students face serious problems when it comes to writing in Arabic, in spite of the emphasis the school has given to enhance productive skills in the Arabic language class. As a result, writing has the lowest percentage of achievement of all the communicative skills. This situation encouraged the researcher to explore alternative strategies to approach the above mentioned problem. Thus, the researcher expects the learners to improve their writing skill and develop a higher degree of involvement in their learning process through the use of visual materials as a means of enhancing Arabic.

• PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

The main purpose of the study is to determine effects of visual materials on the teaching of Arabic in senior secondary schools in Ikeja Local Government Area of Lagos State. The specific objectives of the study are:

1. To determine the pre-test performance of students in the experimental and control groups.
2. To evaluate the posttest performance of students in experimental and control groups.
3. To find out the mean difference between the experimental and the control group.
   • RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In order to have a sense of guide, the following questions were formulated and would be answered by the end of the research.

1. What is the pre-test performance of students in the experimental and control groups?
2. What is the posttest performance of students in experimental and control groups?

• What is the mean difference between the experimental and the control groups?
  • RESEARCH HYPOTHESES

H0: There is a significant difference in the performance of students who were exposed to visual materials and those who were not.

• SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The findings of this study will be of benefit to students, teachers, curriculum planners/developers, textbook writers, ministry of education and future researchers.

Students will benefit from the findings of this study as the use of visual materials in teaching Arabic will boost their achievement and help to increase their creativity of how a descriptive essay is written. It will also help them to develop more interest in writing, acquiring and developing scientific skills which will help them in their career choice particularly those careers geared towards being novelists, playwright, etc.

The findings of this study will be of benefit to teachers of Arabic as it will help teachers in choosing appropriate instructional methods and materials capable of releasing students’ tension toward the subject. It will motivate teachers to develop interest in utilizing modern instructional material like using visual materials in teaching Arabic and selecting suitable teaching methods that will be a possible means towards reducing failure in Arabic language.

The findings of this study will also benefit curriculum planners in curriculum planning as well as using visual materials in planning a curriculum on a specific topic helps to make the instruction conceptually “transparent” to students. Visual materials can be utilized in appropriate strategies of curriculum planning such as modification and revision.

The Federal Ministry of Education can also benefit by using the findings of this study to engage teachers and administrations in training programmes that can model this new educational approaches.

• SCOPE AND DELIMITATION

This study is delimited to effect of visual materials in enhancing descriptive essay writing in Senior Secondary Schools. The study is restricted to two selected Senior Secondary Schools. These schools are Government Secondary School, Ikeja and Government COllege, Ikeja. Despite the fact that this research is limited in scope to Ikeja Local Government Area, the findings can be generic – it can be generalized to other parts of the country as well.

• OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF TERMS

Visual materials: An image is that which depicts visual perception, such as a photograph or other dimensional visual material that resembles a subject – usually a physical object – and thus provides a depiction of it.

Effect: It may refer to a result or change of something. These change could be either negative or positive.

Descriptive Essay: The descriptive essay is a genre of essay that asks the student to describe something – object, person, place, experience, emotion, situation etc. this genre encourages the student’s ability to create a written account of a particular experience.