IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF MUET STUDENTS IN REPORT-WRITING: FROM EXPERIMENT TO ACTIONS

Students always need sincere and kind guidance from the teachers. Hence, a true customer orientation is instrumental in teaching English as it is always good to understand the students’ needs to improve their performance.  This paper addresses the requirement to understand the students’ needs and then teach accordingly to improve the quality of MUET report-writing. A class-room based experiment was done on 40 students in a government school. The students were briefed on the requirements for report writing in MUET. There were experimental and control groups in this study. This research found that the format-driven teaching (FBT) had significantly improved the writing performance of the MUET students. The results indicated that the overall mean score of the students before the FBT teaching stood at 18.50 (out of maximum 40.00), but the score significantly increased to 23.95 after the students were briefed and taught based on the format and requirements of the report-writing. The quality of their writings was much better than before. This research suggested the need of putting the interests of the students first in teaching. The students might have different needs such as not knowing the expectations of the examiners or teachers. Implications and direction for future research were also discussed.