A study On The Effects Of Reading On Writing Performance Student Ubaydullayev Rahmatilla Abstract

Subjects of Study

The subjects selected for this study are the second year students from the Faculty of Civil Engineering who are doing Bachelor Programme in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The subjects were randomly chosen to participate in this study.
The selection was made because the subjects have taken or currently taking the UHB 1412 English for Academic Communication or UHB 2422 Advanced English for Academic Communication. Both reading and writing skills have been included within the English language courses. The subjects also have varied language backgrounds such as Bahasa Melayu and Mandarin. They also have at least ten years exposure to English in primary and secondary schools.

Research Instruments

This study utilized both the quantitative and qualitative research methodology. The main instruments used for data collection in this study were reading text, mind mapping, and writing a short essay and followed by questionnaires. Besides that, the observation checklist was used as the supplementary instrument.

Reading text, mind mapping and writing a short essay

The first writing session required the students to write an essay according to the topic given without reading the materials on related topic. The question paper is shown in Appendix A.
One reading text as shown in Appendix B entitled Applications of Hydrology that was adapted from a website was given to the subjects in the second session of writing. In this session, they were asked to read the text and later to produce a mind map based on their understanding of the text. The text then was taken away and they were asked to write an essay on the given topic. The question papers for mind mapping and essay writing are as shown in Appendix B.
The text used in this study was chosen because its suitability for the subjects of this study. The suitability of the text refers to its level of difficulty, the length of the text and its genre.
The Flesch Reading Ease test was devised by Rudolf Flesch, is one of the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tests used to test the readability of the text. It indicates how difficult a reading passage is to understand. In the Flesch Reading Ease test, higher scores indicate that the passage is easier to read. Meanwhile lesser numbers indicate that the passage is harder to read. The Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES) used the following formula:

According to American standard, scores of 90.0 to 100.0 are considered easily understandable by an average fifth grader. Meanwhile a score of 60 to 70 are considered could be easily understandable by the eighth and ninth grade students and the range of 0 to 30 is considered best understood by college students.
As mentioned earlier, the text entitled Applications of Hydrology was used in this study. The text used for this study was mainly about the used of knowledge on hydrology and the tasks as hydrologists. This text consists of 74 lines with total of 924 words. The readability of the text had been calculated by using The Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES) formula.

Referring to the range of score, the text fall into the average group in which it was considered suitable for the subjects of this study.