Enhancing English Writing Skills Among University of Rwanda Students Through Morning Pages: Case of Gikondo College of Business and Economics, Rwanda

Abstract

In recent decades, English has become a global lingua franca and has been adopted as the language of education in a number of countries all over the world. Rwanda, a country in Eastern Africa, followed this trend and declared English as the medium of instruction from primary school onwards in 2008. Despite this language-in-education policy, most university graduates in Rwanda have for years displayed limited proficiency in English, specifically low writing skills, which may have been enhanced by the country's linguistic landscape with a long French tradition and the use of Kinyarwanda by the majority of Rwandan citizens. This lack of students’ communication skills in English, the target language, has for long been a real concern for the researchers who are lecturers of English at the University of Rwanda. Therefore, they decided to embark on the current study to investigate whether morning pages would contribute to improving their students' English writing skills. The research was carried out at the College of Business and Economics, Gikondo Campus. It involved third-year students enrolled in the academic year 2023-2024, and it made use of quantitative and qualitative research paradigms. Purposive sampling allowed the researchers to select a sample size of 87 students out of 869. The data were collected through observations, a questionnaire, interviews, and document analysis for the sake of triangulation. For data analysis, quantitative data were processed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), whereas qualitative data were grouped into typologies and analysed inductively. The findings revealed that the use of morning pages motivated the students and helped to develop their English writing skills. Hence, the researchers recommended that morning pages be given due consideration and, thus, be introduced in students’ lives at all levels of education in Rwanda.