Abstract
To help students who have difficulty in creative writing, it is important to design pedagogy that suits their needs. This paper reports the design and evaluation of a pedagogical approach for average and lower-ability tertiary students. A multi-sensory approach to instruction on Chinese writing was tested in three associate degree classes (N = 100). The students were taught with a multi-sensory approach in writing Chinese essays in three distinct genres (descriptive, narrative and expressive). The essays were assessed by three assessors: (a) the writer (the student himself or herself), (b) a peer, and (c) the teacher at two time points (before and after the instruction). A 2 (time) × 3 (genre) × 3 (assessor) repeated-measures analysis of variance found statistically significant main effects and also interaction effects. Overall, the approach improved students’ writing over time in all three writing genres. However, the effects were stronger for the expressive and descriptive genres and the students did not find their improvement in the narrative genre as strong as in the other genres. To improve average and lower-ability students’ writing in Chinese, the multi-sensory approach may be helpful, especially in the expressive and descriptive genres.