6. Conclusion(eunnyeong Seong)

Ⅵ. CONCLUSION

Having good writing skills is important to deliver exactly what people express. The ESL learners also need good writing skills to express exactly what they mean. There are many ways to improve writing skills in ESL classes, and reading is one of the effective ways to improve writing skills. Because reading and writing are related to each other and each skill can support to the other, many writing instructors suggest if students want to have good writing skills, they should read a lot consistently. This research, based on the ESL learners experiences, finds out what kinds of reading activities are more effective in improving writing skills. As a result, most ESL learners agree that reading and writing are related to each other and reading is helpful for improving writing skills. Through reading activities, they attain good writing formats and style, good writing models and ideas for writing. As the effective reading levels, they think that reading words, sentences and short stories levels are more useful to improve their writing skills. Also, they select magazines and newspapers, academic journals and articles, and subtitles on TV or movies as good reading materials for improving their writing. In addition, among many post-reading activities, especially learning key vocabulary, summarizing and reading comprehension activities are more helpful to their writing. Most ESL learners can improve their writing skills through reading by themselves or through reading activities in reading and writing class. For improving writing skills, reading materials should be simple and formal as the students can focus on the form as well as meaning, such as short stories, news articles or journals. Also, reading materials, such as web sites or TV programs and movies, should be reflected in the ESL learners’ interests and life styles. It is more important for them to have reading habits. The writing instructors who are

interested in improving students’ writing skills can use reading activities before writing tasks and prepare specific post-reading activities including key vocabulary and reading comprehension in their writing class. This research has several limits. First, this research is limited to specific ESL learners in college, so it is not generalized to all of ESL learners. Second, this research draws conclusions from the ESL learners’ responses, not experimental survey. This research suggests more experimental research about the effective reading activities for improving writing skills in real reading and writing classes. Also, it suggests more survey how to reduce the ESL learners’ difficulties in their writing. Limited vocabulary and unperfected sentence structures make writing hard for the ESL students. Through reading, they usually attain good writing formats and writing models, so they need other activities for extending their vocabulary and knowledge of sentence structure. This research indicates that there are some effective reading activities in improving writing skills for the ESL learners. This research expects that many ESL learners and instructors attain good information about improving writing skills. The students will apply their writing skills in actual writing task through reading and will improve their whole language abilities. Also, the ESL instructor will provide more effective reading activities for students to improve their writings skills and will contribute development of students’ language abilities