Integrating Social Awareness Through Reading and Writing: A Classroom Action Research

As part of professional and course development, a 16-week action research project was carried out in one academic writing class at a university in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Twenty-four students participated in this research. Students were initially introduced to a structure of a summary-response genre, and were encouraged to read a local newspaper, The Cambodia Daily, every weekday. Each week, students were required to submit one journal entry, in which they summarized one piece of news of their interest and responded to it. At the end of the 16 weeks, analysis of the contents of students’ writing showed increase in their social awareness reflected in the sources of news they read and improvement in their ability to give critical responses to news they read. Implications for the use of journal and genre approach are discussed at the end of this paper.