The Leverage of a Proposed Post – Process Writing Approach Program on Developing the EFL Al-Azhar Secondary Students'' Writing Skills by Ismail Ibrahim Elshirbini Abdel-Fattah El-Ashri, Egypt

International Refereed & Indexed Journal of English Language & Translation Studies ISSN: 2308-5460 July-September, 2013 www.eltsjournal.org The purpose of the present study was to inves

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International Refereed & Indexed Journal of English Language & Translation Studies

ISSN: 2308-5460 July-September, 2013 www.eltsjournal.org

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of the Post-Process Writing Approach on developing the required writing skills in English for first year secondary institutes in Al-Azhar Reviewing teaching writing books, literature and related studies, the researcher came up with the most suitable writing skills for the first year secondary institute students and stated them in a checklist Accordingly a proposed writing program, based on the Post-Process Writing Approach, was designed to develop those skills The proposed program was composed of four units including some writing activities The suggested Post-Process strategy appropriate to those activities was used in the program To carry out the experiment of the study, a sample of 60 first year secondary institute students, was randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control one, (30) students each

A Pre Writing test, designed by the researcher, was administered to both the experimental and the control groups to determine the students' level prior to the experiment Having been sure that both groups were of the same level, the experiment

of the study was carried out Then, the pre-test was administered again to both groups after the experiment Comparing the students' mean scores in the pre and post administrations of the test, it was proved that the experimental group students made a remarkable progress in their writing skills due to the use of the suggested program based on The Post-Process Writing Approach Thus, using The Post-Process Writing Approach proved to have a large effect size on developing the required writing skills

in English for the secondary institute students

Keywords: Writing skills, Writing accuracy, Writing approaches, Process approach,

Post process approach, Educational programs

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1 Introduction and background

1.1 The Post-Process approach

Writing is a means of communication that makes human beings uniquely different from other animals Throw writing people express their feelings and thoughts More-recently, some researchers have presented the Post-Process approach for (ESL) (EFL) writing (Atkinson, 2003: Matsuda, 2003) which adds more social dimensions to writers (Fujieda, 2006, p: 68) White Trimbur was the first to put a name to the Post-Process approach by the mid 1990s The term "post-process" arose in composition studies during the early 1990s and quickly became one of the important keywords, shaping the development of an intellectual current in the field

1.2 Steps / stages of writing in light of the Post-Process writing approach 1.2.1 Pre-writing stage

Shafer (2003) argues that facing a blank page is perhaps the most intimidating/

frightening part of writing With a flurry of ideas blowing chaotically in our heads, it

is amazing that anything ever gets written The key, to starting the writing process and avoiding what has become known as writer’s block is to remember that writing, is very much like planting seeds Each time we write paragraphs, we lay down another set of ideas that help us to generate other ideas

1.2.2 Pre-writing activities

There are many activities that can be employed in order to come up with good ideas

and gain inspiration in the pre writing stage such as: Interviewing, Reading,

Discussion, Brain storming, Questioning, Summarizing etc

B- Arrangement activities Graphic organizers

Visual thinking can be expressed in many ways Graphic organizers are many ways for visual thinkers to arrange their ideas There are unlimited ways to express these visual ideas Graphic organizers have many names including visual maps, mind mapping, and visual organizers Graphic organizers can be used in all phases of learning from brainstorming ideas to presenting findings They can be used individually or in large groups

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Post-writing Presenting

Students, in groups, write their topics on large posters, hang them on the wall and present their writings in front of their students

After making a final decision, the students can solve the problem they are writing on

Figure: 1 A model for the sequence of tasks in each lesson in light of the principles

Stage 4

Searching and Reading Discussing , debating

planning and mind mapping

Collaborative Writing

decision making and problem solving

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Students, in groups, collaborate, share ideas and make a draft of the subject of writing

Stage 5

Students ask help and feedback from their peers inside the group or from the other

groups and from the teacher and share ideas to revise their drafts

Stage 6

Students, in groups, co-operate to check their writing They check spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, punctuation mistakes and subject-verb agreement mistakes to edit their writing

Stage 7 Poster presentation

Each group representative presents what they have written on a large poster expressing their ideas and opinions about the subject in front of the class The other groups listen and comment on what is presented in front of them sharing the ideas and exchanging information using a checklist (handout)

1.3 Statement of the Problem

The problem of the present study is manifested in first year secondary institute students' weakness in writing skills

1.4 Research questions

The research included the following questions:

1- What are the English language functional writing skills necessary for first year secondary institute students in Al Azhar?

2- What are the features of a proposed program based on the Post-Process Writing Approach in developing the English language functional writing skills for the first year secondary institute students in Al Azhar?

3-What is the effect of the Post-Process Writing Approach on developing the functional writing skills for the first year secondary institute students in Al-Azhar?

1.5 Hypotheses

The present study verified the following hypotheses:

1- There is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group exposed to the suggested post-process-based instruction

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3- There is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group on the writing pre-test and post-test in overall writing skills in favor of the post-test scores

1- There is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group on the writing pre-test and post-test in each writing skill (content, organization, fluency and accuracy) in favor of the post-test scores

1.6Aims of the Study

The present study aimed at:

1- Developing the functional writing skills of EFL first year secondary institute students in Al-Azhar

2- Investigating the effect of using The Post-Process writing approach in developing the functional writing skills of EFL first year secondary institute students

1.7 Significance of the Study

It is hoped that the present study contributes to:

1- Draw the attention of the teachers of English to the importance of teaching functional writing skills for first year secondary institute students

2- Draw the attention of the teachers of English and the decision makers of the importance of using The Post-Process writing approach in developing the functional writing skills of EFL first year secondary institute students of Al-Azhar

3- Provide the teachers of English with a list of some activities necessary for developing the functional writing skills of first year secondary institute students of Al-Azhar

1.8 Limitations of the study

The present study was limited to:

1- Two classes of first year secondary students at Alazhr institutes

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3- Functional writing skills of secondary stage students

2 Methodology of the study

2.1 Sample of the study

A group of 60 first - year secondary institute students of two classes from two institutes was randomly selected from Satamooni secondary institute for girls in Satamooni village and Mansoura secondary institute for girls, Dakhilyia Governorate,

in the first semester of the school year 2012 / 2013 The two classes were randomly assigned to two groups; experimental (the class of Mansoura secondary institute for girls) and control (the class of Satamooni secondary institute for girls in Satamooni village) The number of the students in each of the two classes was 30 students

2.2 Instruments of the study

The following instruments were developed by the researcher:

1- A writing checklist required for first year secondary institute students of Azhar

Al-2- A writing performance test (pre and post) (By the researcher)

2.3 Design of the study

The study adopted the quasi-experimental design

2.4 Procedures of the study

1- Reviewing literature to specify the required functional writing skills for the target students

2- Preparing a functional writing skills checklist

3- Presenting the functional writing skills checklist to a group of jurors for validation

4- Constructing a pre- post writing performance test

5- Presenting the pre-post writing performance test to a group of jurors for validation

6-Constructing the suggested program based on The Post-Process writing Approach which consisted of :

(a) A teacher's guide about how to apply The Post-Process writing Approach in

developing the functional writing skills

(b) Students' book

(c) Handouts

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7- Administering the performance writing test as a pretest for the two groups (experimental and control) to measure the students' performance in writing

8- Implementing the suggested program based on The Post-Process writing Approach

on the experimental group while the control group studied using the traditional method

9- Administering the post-performance writing test for the two groups (experimental and control), the same form of the pretest, as a post test to measure the students' performance in writing

10- Analyzing data statistically

11- Reaching conclusions and providing recommendations

2.5 Method Design of the Study

In the present study, two classes were randomly chosen to present the experimental and the control groups The experimental group used the suggested functional writing program, based on The Post-Process Writing Approach, to develop the functional writing skills while the control group received regular instruction A pre -( test was administered to the two groups before and after the experiment The pre -administration of the test was to prove that the control and the experimental groups were of equal level prior to implementing the suggested program

2.6 Subjects of the study

A group of 60 first - year secondary institute students of two classes from two institutes was randomly selected from Satamooni secondary institute for girls in Satamooni village and Mansoura secondary institute for girls, Dakhilyia Governorate,

in the first semester of the school year 2012 / 2013 The two classes were randomly assigned to two groups; experimental (the class of Mansoura secondary institute for girls) and control (the class of Satamooni secondary institute for girls in Satamooni village) The number of the students in each of the two classes was 30 students

- The pre- administration of the functional writing skills test aimed at being sure that the two groups (the experimental and the control) were equal in the functional writing skills performance before teaching The pre-administration was on the first of October

2012 The papers were corrected using the correction rules determined previously by the researcher Results were statistically analyzed using ''t'' test as indicated in the following table:

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Table: 1''t'' value and its significance for the difference between the mean scores of

the two groups: the experimental and the control in the pre-administration of the functional writing skills test

mean (M)

Standard deviation S

D

"t" value Sig

sig at

(sig) the difference between the two scores

Paired Tabled

statistically difference

- The above table No (1) shows that:

- The level of achievement in the functional writing test was equal as there was no statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the two groups on the pre- administration of the functional writing test

2.7 Duration of the Experiment

The experiment lasted for nearly three months, almost twelve weeks in the first term

of the school year 2012/2013 to investigate the effect of using the Post-Process Writing Approach on developing the required functional writing skills for the secondary school institute students in Al-Azhar Al-Shareef

2.8 Tools of the study

The present study used two main tools:

A- The writing skills' checklist

B- The pre -post writing test

A-The Writing Skills' Checklist:

Purpose of the Checklist:

The writing checklist aimed at determining the most important functional writing

skills to be developed for first year secondary students at Al-Azhar institutes

B-The Pre - Post Writing Test

Purpose of the Test:

The pre- administration of the test was used to make sure that the students of both the experimental and the control groups were of the same functional writing level prior to the experiment Therefore, the progress achieved by the experimental group could be attributed to the suggested writing program, based on the Post-Process writing

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approach, to which they were exposed As for the post administration of the test, it was used to investigate the effect of the suggested program on developing the selected functional writing skills in general and on each of the four categories of skills in particular (content, organization, language fluency and language accuracy)

Piloting the Test:

The pilot study of the test aimed at timing the test, determining the difficulty of the questions included in the test and determining item analysis results including item difficulty and item discrimination

Subjects of the pilot study:

Thirty students other than the subjects of the experimental or control groups were selected for the pilot study They were selected randomly from one class in Satamooni secondary institute for girls, Dakhilyia Governorate

Test time:

It was estimated that a period of sixty minutes would provide ample time for students

to complete the test

The time was estimated in the following way:

The time taken by the + the time taken by the

Fastest student slowest student ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Moreover, they were asked to evaluate the test as a whole in terms of correctness,

number of questions, scoring method and difficulty of the writing test

Test Reliability:

To guarantee that the pre - post functional writing test was reliable, the researcher used the test - retest method The test was administered twice to a sample of 20 first year secondary students at Abdel Fattah Azzam institute for girls, Dakhilyia governorate It is worth saying here that this sample was chosen randomly and was not included in the sample of the experiment The time span between the two

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VAR00001 Pearson Correlation

1.000 919

Sig (2-tailed)

.000

N

30

VAR00002 Pearson Correlation

.919 1.000

Sig (2-tailed) 000

N

30

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

Applying the above Pearson correlation, the reliability co-efficient was (.919), thus proving that the functional writing test was statically reliable

The Test Administration:

After estimating the suitable time for taking the test, based on results of the test piloting on September 2012, the pre - posttest was first administered to the control and experimental groups in the normal classroom situation so that students' performance would he natural It was administered on the first of October 2012; that was two days prior to the experiment Time allocated to the test as estimated was 60 minutes The pre - posttest was also administered to both the experimental and the control groups two days after the end of the experiment ended on the 20th of January

2013

Scoring the test Rubric and description validity:

First the researcher marked the students' answers to the test according to the specified marks for each item of the functional writing skills, and then he gave the answers to another teacher of English

3 The Suggested Functional Writing Program

3.1 Aim of the Program

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1- Presenting the main idea in the form of a topic sentence

2- Presenting a number of accurate and well- chosen details to support the main idea

(Clarity) 3- Giving the reader relevant, coherent and important information in line with the topic (Focus)

4- Writing a suitable introduction

5- Using logical sequence to help the ideas flow together

6- Writing a suitable conclusion

7- Using the correct layout of the form of writing a paragraph, a letter and an e-mail

8- Using varieties of vocabulary that are related to the content

9- Using various grammar structures eg :- tenses, pronouns and conjunctions

10- Using correct spelling

11- Using correct punctuation

12- Producing eligible handwriting

3.2 Content of the program

The writing skills subsumed under content, organization, language fluency and language accuracy were taught throughout four units comprising twelve lessons Each lesson focused on particular main writing skills These particular skills were selected because they were considered appropriate for first year secondary school students as they are the main skills focused upon in the ministry objectives and the teacher's guide Although each unit focused on a particular writing skill, many sub-skills

occurred during the course of each unit

The units included were as follows:- Unit 1: Skills related to content Unit 2: Skills related to Organization

Unit 3: Skills related to language fluency

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Unit 4: Skills related to language Accuracy Each unit consisted of two or three or sometimes four lessons, each including some writing tasks addressing the lessons main skills Writing tasks in every unit were arranged in order of difficulty, which was determined, by their linguistic complexity and cognitive requirements

The writing activities used were:- Throughout the lessons, students were required to perform the following activities:

- Discuss ideas views and opinions through opinion gap tasks

- Solve problems and find solutions

- Exchange information through information gap activity

- Collaborate and write

- Revise and edit what they have written

- Present and comment on what they have written sharing the ideas

In addition, each lesson included some supplementary materials to which students were exposed to before doing or during the activity It's worth mentioning here that some "Handouts" were also provided to resort to in time of need and to support discussions among students Handout one is entitled: The importance of learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Handout two is entitled: The following subjects relate to the Social, Cultural , political , Religious and economic fields of life

Choose some of them and write on Handout three is also about topics of writing

Handout four is entitled: The English language four skills Handout five is entitled:

Approaches for Teaching writing Handout six is entitled: The Process writing approach Handout seven is entitled: A figure presents a model for the sequence of tasks in each lesson throughout the program Handout eight is entitled: In the post-process writing approach we learn that Handout nine is entitled: How to write a paragraph Handout ten is entitled: How to write a letter Handout eleven is entitled:

How to write an e-mail Handout twelve is entitled: The rules of punctuation Handout thirteen is entitled: The rules of spelling

When the content of the program was designed, the researcher chose the content materials that relate to the social, political, cultural, economic and religious fields of life to be suitable with the principles of the post-process writing approach which was

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adopted by the researcher on implementing the programme to develop the functional writing skills for the first year secondary institute students of Al-Azhar Al-Shareef

3.3 Learning Objectives at the Lesson Level

An example from Unit (1) Lesson (1):

By the end of this lesson, students would be able to:-

1 Discuss the appropriate topic sentences for given topics

2 Determine the characteristics of a topic sentence

3 Identify the topic sentence in a paragraph

4 Write a topic sentence expressing the main idea of given paragraphs

5 Use vocabulary meaningfully and functionally

6 Write grammatically – correct sentences

3.4 Instructional aids and equipment

The following aides were used during implementing the program:

1- The white board

3.5 Duration of the Program

The program lasts for twelve lessons, (eighty minutes each), during the first term of the academic year 2012-2013 plus an introductory lesson The overall classroom periods specified for the program were twelve periods in addition to an introductory period The experimentation of the program started on the first of October 2012 and ended on the 20th of January 2013 thus the program was taught in thirteen weeks, one session a week

3.6 Evaluation

The formative evaluation employed in the present study was writing portfolio It was used as an indicator of the students' gradual development in writing during the implementation of the program and as a sign of the great development achieved in both writing quantity and quality till the end of the program

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Another type of evaluation was summative It was manifested in the functional writing test that was administered at the end of the experiment The main purpose of the test was to measure the fulfillment of the objectives of the program In other words, it was meant to investigate the effect of using the suggested functional writing program based on The Post-Process writing approach on developing the required functional writing skills for first year secondary institutes students

3.7 The proposed teaching strategy

The proposed teaching strategy adopted in the present study was designed in the light

of the Post-Process writing approach According to this teaching strategy, each writing lesson was divided into six main phases as represented in figure (1):-

Figure: 2 A model for the sequence of tasks in each lesson throughout the program

- Questioning - Use of L1 + study groups

- Summarizing - Modeling

b) During writing:-

c) Post-writing:-

- Commenting - presenting

4 Statistical Analysis and Discussion of the Results

4.1Verifying research hypotheses

Before presenting the study results to each hypothesis, it is important to mention that there are two sets of hypotheses The first set includes those hypotheses concerned

planning and mind mapping

Collaborative

Writing

decision making and problem solving

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