The Impact of a Suggested Programme on Developing Writing Skills and Attitudes of Eleventh Graders

Abstract

The present study investigated the impact of a suggested programme based on process writing approach on developing paragraph writing skills and students' attitudes towards writing in general and writing as a process in particular. The target paragraph writing skills were brainstorming, outlining, constructing a topic sentence and its controlling idea, providing supporting sentences, writing a conclusion and writing a unified and a coherent paragraph. The researcher purposively chose a sample of (87) eleventh graders from Al-Faloja Secondary Girls School in the Northern Governorate. The members of the sample were two classes that the researcher taught. One of them was assigned as an experimental group and the other was assigned as the control one. The two groups were equivalent since the experimental consisted of (43) participants and the control consisted of (44) participants. Three tools were used to serve the purpose of the study. The first was an attitude scale for students to determine their attitudes towards writing before and after the intervention. The second tool was an achievement test to measure the participants' paragraph writing skills before and after implementing the programme to see the difference. The third tool was the writing process based suggested programme. The results were collected and statistically analyzed, using (SPSS). The findings of the study revealed that there were significant differences between the score achieved by the control group and the experimental group after applying the suggested programme and in the participants' attitudes towards academic writing after the programme positively changed in favor of the experimental group. In the light of these findings, the researcher recommends EFL teachers to use process writing approach as a valuable approach of improving students' paragraph writing skills and developing their attitudes towards it.