Teaching Writing by Writing

Writing is a challenging task for English learners, but they cannot develop writing process naturally (Brown, 2001); therefore, according to O’Malley and Chamot (1990) it’s profitable for teachers to make students aware of writing techniques through the use of direct instruction. This study is an effort to tackle process writing and investigating whether cooperative technique of writing can help Iranian EFL learners improve their writing proficiency. Moreover, it examined whether explicit teaching of grammar via learners’ grammar mistakes in their writings help them improve their grammar knowledge to write accurately. To this aim, 17 EFL students (male and female), majoring in English Language Translation, from Payam-e Noor University (Mahabad Branch, Iran) were selected. All were in intermediate level. The procedure consisted of three phases. First, they were introduced to different kinds of paragraphs: classification, cause and effect, comparison, contrast, process and graph. It took six sessions; in fact, they follow their coursebook, paragraph development (Arnaudet and Barrett, 1990). One of their writing in this phase was considered a pretest to assess their writing ability. Next, through two sessions, they were given four texts contained some grammar mistakes which must be corrected by students. The researcher intended to make them aware of their own mistakes in their writings in this way. The following six sessions specified to writing one paragraph cooperatively. They were instructed to write one paragraph together, sentence by sentence. The researcher explained the process; pre-writing, brainstorming to generate ideas collaboratively, focusing on the importance of topic sentence, writing cooperatively, and post writing to check writing conventions. Their last writing was their posttest at the end of the treatment period. Their compositions were graded by two independent raters using a modified Writing Scoring Rubric (Wang and Liao, 2008) and each aspect of writing (focus, elaboration/ support, organization, conventions, and vocabulary) was graded on a scale from 1 to 5. Therefore, the participants' writings were graded on a 25-point scale. Results of Paired Sample t- test show that there is a relationship between using cooperative writing and generating more ideas and producing more developed compositions. Results suggest that there were significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the participants in focus, support and organization. However, the difference in grammar and vocabulary was not statistically significant. Qualitative findings support the quantitative findings. That is, students expressed their positive attitudes towards cooperative writing which gave them confident to write effectively.