Vol. 2 No. Special Issue (2025): Teaching Young Language Learners
Articles

Teaching writing skills with LEGOⓇ blocks

Paper
  • Monika Wójtowicz
Monika Wójtowicz
University of the National Education Commission, Krakow

Published 2025-01-28

Keywords

  • writing skills, LEGOⓇ blocks, primary school, EFL

Copyright (c) 2025 Monika Wójtowicz (Author)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Wójtowicz, M. (2025). Teaching writing skills with LEGOⓇ blocks. Journal of Language and Culture in Education, 2(Special Issue), 107-129. https://doi.org/10.5281/6j85n811

Abstract

The research, which took the form of a pedagogical intervention called “Brick-by-Brick: Writing Intervention Program” and involved ten 5th-grade students, five girls and five boys, from a Polish primary school, assessed the effects of teaching English writing skills by implementing didactic materials inspired by LEGOⓇ blocks. The researcher designed three educational tools to teach writing skills: a model of a complex sentence connected by the conjunction (“The LEGOⓇ blocks sentence structure model”), a LEGOⓇ blocks set, and a LEGOⓇ sentences worksheet with a self-assessment section (“The LEGOⓇ Sentences”). Ten pre-tests, fifty worksheets and ten post-tests were analysed, taking into account four types of data: the number of word order errors (WOE), the number of sentences (NS) and their complexity (SC), the number of total written words (TWW), and students’ self-assessments (SA). The researcher observed the development of students’ skills in following the correct order of words in a sentence, building complex sentences connected by a conjunction, and creating increasingly longer written statements. It was also important for the researcher to recognise what kind of experience developing writing skills in English was for the students, whether they perceived it as negative, neutral or positive. The study outcomes showed that the applied solutions increased students’ skills in all analysed criteria (WOE, NS, SC, TWW). Moreover, the intervention aroused predominantly positive feelings among the students, leaving the memory of an unusual experience.

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