The Use of Seesaw in Increasing Pupils' Reading Interest

Good reading skills enable understanding of a piece of writing. According to Malaysian Curriculum Development Department [31], reading skill is one of the focus language skills. However, pupils are showing least interest in reading particularly English materials. This paper aimed to examine the effectiveness of using Seesaw, an online application, to increase the interest of reading for Year 3(9-year-old) ESL pupils in a school in Selangor. Seesaw is a digital portfolio that empowers pupils by providing them with a platform to showcase their learning in school. With Seesaw, pupils could learn from the feedback of their peers and teacher regardless of the time frame and geographical factors. This virtual platform has gained pupils' motivation to present on a reading task and aroused their interest in accomplishing reading tasks. This research is only focused on the effectiveness of using Seesaw to increase the interest of pupils in reading in Seri Kembangan, Selangor area. The data were collected from interviews and questionnaires with the adaptation of action research model by Kemmis and McTaggart. A total of 30 Year 3 pupils who are studying in the same school were purposively selected as the sampling of the study. Results have shown that the interest of pupils in reading is increased after using Seesaw. Hence, further study is needed to ascertain the effectiveness of using Seesaw in other language skills. Future studies with more participants from different levels are also needed to generalise the findings to a larger population and provide a deeper insight.