Effect Of Pre-Writing Activities On Js1 Students' Achievementin Letter Writing In Gwer Local Government Area Of Benue State, Nigeria

This study investigated the effect of pre-writing activities on Junior Secondary School One (JS1) students' achievement in letter writing in Gwer Local Government Area of Benue State. Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study. A quasi-experimental pre-test–post-test non-equivalent group design was adopted. The study involved 553 JS1 students selected from two junior secondary schools, comprising 330 students in the experimental group and 223 in the control group. Data were collected using a Writing Achievement Test (WAT), which assessed students' achievement in the content and organisation of formal and informal letters. The instrument was validated by three experts and yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.70 using KR-21. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, while ANCOVA was used to test the hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance. The experimental group recorded higher post-test means in content (43.48, SD = 15.14) than the control group (26.68, SD = 12.85), and in organisation (44.74, SD = 15.50) than the control group (26.68, SD = 12.34). The reported ANCOVA results indicated significant group effects for content (F = 31.616, p < .001) and organisation (F = 7.552, p = .007). However, inconsistencies in the supplied ANCOVA output require verification from the original SPSS output before the exact degrees of freedom, sums of squares and effect sizes are reported. The findings suggest that explicit pre-writing instruction was associated with higher achievement in the two assessed dimensions of letter writing.