Boosting EFL College Student Writing Achievement

65 EFL freshman students were enrolled in their first writing course in college. Before instruction, they were pretested. Pretest results revealed many writing problems. Then, the students studied Interactions One. Each week, one chapter was covered and the students completed all of the skills, exercises and writing tasks in the chapter and wrote two one-paragraph essays. They were encouraged to write and not to worry about spelling, grammatical, punctuation or capitalization mistakes. While doing the exercises and writing the paragraphs, I monitored their work individually and provided individual help. I gave communicative feedback. Self-editing and peer-editing were encouraged. Extra credit was given for good paragraphs. The students were tested every other week. Quizzes were always graded, returned to the students with comments on strengths and weaknesses. Answers were always discussed in class. At the end of the semester, the students were posttest. Posttest essays showed a great improvement in their writing ability. Improvement was noted in the students’ assignments, in essay length, neatness, mechanical correctness and style. A detailed account of the factors that lead to improvement in writing English will be given.

Prof. Reima Al-jarf
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/aljarf