Enhancing English Writing Engagement Among Struggling Writers Through Themed Vocabulary: An Action Research Study in a Malaysian Vocational College

Abstract

Vocational students in Malaysia frequently disengage from English writing tasks, and limited lexical resource is among the barriers most often reported. This action research examined whether supplying a themed vocabulary list as a writing scaffold was associated with changes in the writing engagement of nine low-proficiency Semester 3 Welding Technology students at a vocational college in Selangor. Following Lewin's action research spiral, a four-week cycle of planning, action, observation and reflection was carried out. Verbs and adjectives drawn from the Science and Technology theme of the syllabus were introduced, discussed in context, practised in controlled exercises and then applied in sentence construction and guided writing. Engagement was examined across the cognitive, behavioural and emotional dimensions using classroom observation, a twelve-item questionnaire completed by all nine participants, interviews with two participants and a guided writing task, analysed descriptively. All nine participants produced grammatically acceptable simple sentences, while six produced at least one correct compound sentence, a difference consistent with the additional processing demand of coordinating two clauses. Questionnaire responses were uniformly favourable, with no participant selecting Disagree or Strongly Disagree on any item. Interview accounts point to reduced hesitation at the point of starting a task, alongside continuing difficulty in sustaining motivation across longer pieces. The study suggests that themed vocabulary may lower the entry cost of a writing task for struggling vocational writers without addressing persistence. With a single intact group, no comparison condition and partial reliance on self-report to a teacher-researcher, the findings are indicative rather than causal.