The Effectiveness of a Suggested Program in Enhancing EFL Critical Reading and Writing Skills for the Secondary Students in light of Connectivism Theory

Abstract

The current study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of a suggested Program in enhancing EFL critical reading and writing skills for first year secondary Students in light of Connectivism theory. The researcher adopted the quasi-experimental approach. The participants of the study were two intact classes of (80) students. They were selected from Abu Bakr Al-Seddeek Official Language School, Sheikh Zayed Educational Directorate. The researcher designed a program based on Connectivism theory for enhancing critical reading and writing skills, which was used in teaching the experimental group, while the regular method was used in teaching the control one in the first term of the academic year 2018 / 2019. A critical reading and writing skills test was designed and validated to be used as a pre and post test for the two groups of students. The data were analyzed statistically using a t-test to measure the difference between the performance of the experimental group in the pre-post-test and the difference between the performance of both experimental and control groups in the critical reading and writing skills post-test. The effectiveness of the Connectivism theory-based program in enhancing first year secondary students' EFL critical reading and writing skills, was measured using the effect size technique (Eta Square).The study results revealed that there was a statistically significant difference at (a ≤ 0.01) between the mean scores of the experimental group on the pre-test and post-test in the critical reading and writing skills in favour of the post-test. There was also a statistically significant difference at (a ≤ 0.01) between the mean scores of the control group and the experimental group on the post-test in the critical reading and writing skills in favour of the experimental group.