The Effect of Reading on Improving the Writing of EFL Students

Since reading and writing have been taught separately and independently by some English instructors, students, especially EFL learners, do not use their knowledge in either area to improve their literacy learning in general. This study is aimed at examining the impact of incorporating reading in efforts to improve the writing skills of EFL students. In this study, five Iranian students, studying in an international school in Malaysia, were purposively selected. Two instruments were used: a compiled genre-specific corpus as the main tool to evaluate the participants’ level of proficiency in writing and two semi-structured interviews as supplementary instruments to obtain EFL participants’ perspectives on the effect of reading on the development of writing skills. The method used to analyse the corpus was CACA, short for computer-assisted corpus analysis, where the written texts from the pre-test and the post-test were used and compiled into a corpus and then tagged and analysed using suitable concordance software. After intervention was done, the participants were given some instruction on how to write effectively. The findings indicated that the participants’ writing skills had significantly improved by integrating reading in writing tasks. It is hoped that the findings of this study will help students as well as English teachers realise the significant role of reading in writing i.e. in enhancing writing performance and motivating students to read at the same time.