Coverage of Women Issues in the Pakistan’s Press: A Critical Analysis

The aim of this research is to thoroughly analyze the part multilingual dailies play in covering women issues in Pakistan. It is rooted from national newspapers, the Daily ‘Dawn’, the Daily ‘Jang’ and the Daily ‘Kawish’ in the year of 2011. The study explores to what extent of the violence against women and education issue of women is dealt by the sampled dailies. The study employed content analysis a quantitative research methodology during 1st January 2011 to 31st December 2011. The contents of the newspaper were measured in column per centimeter of the space of one year. For this research work three major dailies of three different languages, the Daily Dawn, the Daily Jang and the Daily Kawish were selected. In sum up, an elite class newspaper the Daily Dawn has published 562 very little issues of women and used 0.6 percent of the total capacity which is of 4353024 co./cm in the year of 2011. However, the Sindhi language newspaper, the Daily Kawish has used 2430 a little more issue of women and covered 2.3 percent of total capacity of 1678976 col./cm of this daily in 2011. To some extent, the Urdu language newspaper the Daily Jang has reported 1297 more number of women issues and used 1 percent of total capacity of 2423616 col./cm in one year. Hence, the result shows that Pakistani press gives a little bit space to issues of women rights. Although, the Daily Dawn and the Daily Kawish have reported more issues of violence against women but the Daily Jang (an Urdu language newspaper) has covered more education problems of women in its newspaper in the year of 2011.

Improving Secondary Students English Essay Writing Skills by Implementing Portfolio Assessment in a Private School in Gilgit-Baltistan

Formative assessment or assessment for learning is a type of assessment that informs pedagogical practices and helps teachers to align learning activities with learning needs of the students. Portfolio assessment is popular formative assessment technique which is helpful in improving language learning. Therefore this study aimed at implementing portfolio assessment to enhance the essay writing skills of grade pre-ninth students in a private school in Gilgit-Baltistan, This study employed collaborative action research method. For this study, six research participant students of two slow learners, two average level learners and two high achieving students of grade nine were selected through purposive sampling. In addition, the English Language teacher of the same class was also a participant with a proposed role of equal contributor in the study as the researcher. The findings of the study illustrated that before the intervention the students had problems with essay writing. Moreover, from the document analysis and classroom observations I realised that the students needed practice on the structural composition as well as mechanics of writing such as spelling errors, punctuations and sentence construction. In particular, they often made grammatical mistakes and could not organize their ideas in a proper sequence to write a meaningful paragraph. However, after employing portfolio assessment in the classroom in collaboration with the participant teacher, there was a visible change in the writing skills of the students. Hence, they could write a grammatically correct and well organized descriptive essay. This research study presents the role of portfolio assessment in improving students writing skills. In addition, it would also encourage English Language teachers to implement portfolio assessment to enhance students' reading as well as writing skills. In particular, this study would be helpful in understanding the prospects of portfolio assessment in the context of Gilgit-Baltistan.