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Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the effect of teacher-student conferences on ESP students’ reading and writing performance. The theoretical background consisted of two main sections. The first section was about the process of conferencing while the second was about conferencing and graphic language skills. Participants were 25 post-graduates at the Special Diploma at the Faculty of Education in Suez. Instruments were: two reading tests, two writing tests, a reading marking scale, a writing marking scale, and two teacher-student conference recording sheets. All students were pretested then divided into two equivalent groups: control (12 students) and experimental (13 students). The experiment lasted for three months. During this period, the experimental group had individual teacher-student conferences once a week. Each session lasted for about three hours. Upon the completion of the experiment, all participants were posttested. Differences between the pretests and posttests were calculated for each group separately using Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test. No significant differences were found between the pretests and posttests of reading and writing in the control group while the experimental group showed a significant improvement on the reading test but not on the writing test. Mann-Whitney U Test, which was used to calculate the difference between the mean gain score of the control group and that of the experimental group, confirmed the same results. It was concluded that teacher-student conferences had a significant effect on the reading performance but not on the writing one of ESP students. Based on these results, it was recommended that: (1) Egyptian ESP teachers should be familiarized with new trends in teaching and assessing reading and writing. (2) University teachers should begin to reconsider their methods of teaching reading and writing. (3) Teachers should encourage students to take part in evaluating their reading and writing performance.