Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory in enhancing narrative writing skills in Malaysian national secondary schools

This research explored the effectiveness of Social Development Theory in enhancing narrative writing skills. Besides that, this study incorporated the main communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity thinking (4C’s) of 21st century learning skills to enable the students to practise narrative writing skills in a social environment by using an online learning platform via mobile devices. The narrative writing activities were practised by using a created writing module which is known as 4C’s to WRITE. There were several issues in narrative writing skills among students as they were unable to generate proper main ideas and improper usage of the elements of plot, causing frequent errors in the grammar and vocabulary structures. There were 55 Form 4 students who participated in this study. These students are from two different secondary schools which are from Penang, and Kedah in Malaysia. They took part in the treatment phase for 10 weeks. The researcher used a mixed-method data collection to collect the data in this study. The instruments that were employed were pre-test and post-test for qualitative data collection, while participant observation for qualitative data collection. The findings indicated that the students significantly benefited from this study as there was an improvement in their post-test for both schools. This reveals that peer scaffolding and procedural scaffolding from Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory permitted the students to communicate, collaborate, as well as use their critical thinking and creativity thinking to identify the main ideas, organize the ideas into a few paragraphs by following the elements of plot for writing a story, as well as use proper grammar and vocabulary features. This study recommends that policymakers and educators could create more writing modules for different types of writing skills and encourage students to practise with their peers using technology platforms to foster their overall writing skills.