The Experiences of Majlis Amanah Rakyat (MARA) English Teachers in Teaching Writing for a Dual High-Stakes Examination System at MARA Junior Science College (MRSM) in Tawau Sabah

In Malaysia, English is taught as a second language with attention given to all four language skills, including writing. Teaching English to pupils, particularly non-English speakers, requires proper approaches, practices and sequential learning tasks. As a result, each teacher has his or her challenges in teaching English as a second language, towards improving pupils’ writing fluency as well as ensuring pupils’ excellence in high-stakes examinations such as SPM and IGCSE. Although many programmes have been concerned with the improvement of writing fluency among secondary school pupils while high-stakes examination has been adopted by education systems in Malaysia due to its practicality, the results, have yet been dismayed. Thus, this paper intends to unveil the emerging challenges faced by English teachers of Majlis Amanah Rakyat (MARA) in Sabah and the approaches used in teaching English specifically towards improving ESL writing fluency in a dual different high-stakes examination according to the Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and the standardised national curriculum. The methodology used was qualitative in the form of semi-structured interviews conducted with the 5 English MARA stakeholders who are currently teaching at MRSM located in Sabah and in-class observation. The limitations of this study are the small range of population, the scope of this study is limited to secondary school teachers teaching English in a dual high-stakes examination context, and the limited literature review on approaches in teaching writing fluency for the IGCSE examination. It is hoped that the findings of this study could help other teachers to have some insights on how to enhance student’s writing fluency, particularly for the IGCSE examination.