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The reality of learning a language is that students are diverse in terms of capability to grasp the language lessons given. Cognitive development, socio-cultural background, gender, motivation are a few factors that affect their ability to learn a target language. Thus, this paper is concerned about the effectiveness of Differentiated Instructions (DI) in catering low proficiency students so that they could excel in their ESL writing tasks and their perceptions of DI in improving their writing skills. A study was conducted in a sub urban primary school in Sandakan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. There were 29 respondents altogether from a class of Standard 4 which are categorized as low proficiency students based on their LINUS results in the previous year. The data were collected using mixed methods and, an analysis and discussion about the effectiveness of DI were done by comparing students’ pre-test and post-test scores and their perceptions towards DI were concluded from the interview and observations throughout the study. A questionnaire adapted from VARK questionnaire version 7.0 was used to determine students’ learning preferences before they were divided into three groups to undergone the DI strategies. The results of the study show there are some improvements in students’ writing as shown in the post-test results. Their behaviours in writing classes also have changed from being anxious to being confident at the end of the study. In general, it seems that DI could be used as one of the approach to help primary schools’ students to excel their ESL writing lessons. Besides, teachers should also take into consideration of implementing DI not only for writing skills but also other language skills.

Learning Language Strategy has come out with several of strategies that can be chosen or used among the pupils. Every pupil has also had another potential in using the learning language strategy in many ways. This study was conducted to investigate the learning language strategy by using vocabulary strategy among 19 school pupils at a rural school in Sabah. The survey was carried out among the pupils of Year 4 and Year 6 to find out which strategy they prefer most in language learning strategy. There were choices of strategies that can be chose by the pupils which were listening, vocabulary, speaking, reading, writing and translation. Among those strategies that have been tested, they chose vocabulary strategy as their most preference based on the analysis frequency of the survey that has been distributed. The survey contained the vocabulary test and the vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire. In addition, they least preferred to listening strategies followed by writing strategies. This can be perhaps for the teachers to make a brand-new step to arise the motivation among pupils to expand their vocabulary in many attractive and interesting ways which then affects to many more benefits in speaking, reading and writing.