Abstract

• The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of collaborative learning in teaching English writing to Grade Nine students. Quantitatively, an experimental study was used to compare the paragraph writing achievement of the students who were taught by collaborative learning techniques and those who were taught by conventional teaching method. One of the Quasi-experimental designs, the nonequivalent control group design, was used. In this experimental study, the participants were (157) Grade Nine students from two schools; Basic Education High School (Branch)-Taungni, Mogaung and Basic Education High School (Branch)- Namana, Mogaung. The two groups from each school were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The participants from the experimental groups were taught by using collaborative learning techniques; think-pair-share strategy and collaborative writing strategy. The participants from the control group were taught by using conventional teaching method. Before the treatment period, a pretest was administered to measure the writing skill of the students. After the treatment period, a posttest was administered to two groups. Then, independent samples ttest was used to analyze whether there was significant difference between the two groups or not. The findings showed that there was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups for the scores on paragraph writing achievement test in BEHS (Branch)-Taungni (p=.002) and BEHS (Branch)-Namana (p=.011) at the levels of p<.01 and p<.05 respectively. Therefore, the results of this study indicated that collaborative learning has positive effect on developing the writing skill of Grade Nine students.