STUDENTS’ COGNITIVE CHALLENGES IN SELECTED COMPETENCIES IN GRADE 10: AN ANALYSIS

Education

The study investigated how Grade 10 students construct opinion statements and build claims for fact, policy, and value, based on two genres, news articles and comics. Specifically, it explored clausal and phrasal constructions and linguistic markers such as modals, connectives, and stance. Results showed that although students tried to use complex sentences, their output was not accurate, clear, and coherent. Moreover, comic-based tasks evoked more personal and expressive writing, whereas tasks based on news articles were more formal and less developed. In both genres, it was observed that students lacked vocabulary, academic writing skills, and structural skills, as manifested by their cognitive difficulties such as poor sentence construction skills, short attention span, lack of metacognitive skills, and over-reliance on technology. To cope with the inadequacy in academic writing skills, a new pedagogical tool was realized: Digital Comics Cognitive Support Toolkit. This new pedagogical tool is based on genre-based pedagogy, multimodal learning, and cognitive scaffolding. It is recommended that the toolkit be validated by experts, used as supplementary material in Grade 10 English, and improved to be used in teaching academic writing.

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