INTRODUCTION As learners of ESL, UiTM students face problems in the writing skill compared to other basic language skills (Elia, Kardina & Nazirah, 2006). Writing has for a long time been claimed as a very difficult skill to acquire and dreaded by ESL students (Gupta, 1998). Writing for the sake of writing has become a drag, and produces shallow, boring output. In most proficiency courses, some of these students are sorely lacking in practice and stimulus for imagination and creativity. To a certain degree their writing in general reads dull and dry, their stories are merely displays of boring chronological events, having no life, content and direly lacking in proficiency. With mother tongue interference, they are further handicapped in the domain of creative and imaginative writing. Undoubtedly they have difficulties going beyond the surface idea in writing, i.e. having problems in proficiency, elaborating ideas and lacking subject knowledge and content details which are essential elements important in making an essay linguistically competent, interesting and creative. However one way of overcoming this according to Hismanoglu (2005) is through literature. Literature enhances writing skills when students learn the syntax and discourse functions of sentences, the variety of possible structures, and the different ways of connecting ideas thus developing and enriching their own writing skills. This paper focuses on the writing skill of students as the aim is to find a method of text criticism that could bear some systematic relation to the development of linguistic as well as creative and literary skills through a literature instruction in an ESL class.
