Scaffolding EFL Students’ Writing through the Writing Process Approach

Abstract

This research reports a study conducted at Koya University/English Language Department, and it aims at presenting the effect of scaffolding on EFL students’ writing ability through the writing process. In this study, the students have taken the role of writers, so they need to follow the same steps that writers apply during their writing process. To this end, students start with writing process approach such as Prewriting, Drafting, Revising, Editing, and ended with Publishing. Students are provided with teacher scaffolding from the beginning until the end of writing process. Pre- and post-writing tasks are collected from the learners for both giving feedback and checking student’s writing improvement. This study aims at investigating the effect of teacher’s scaffolding with teaching writing process on improving students’ writing skills. For this investigation, thirty second-year college students studying in the English Department, School of Languages, Koya University were selected to be subjects of this study. They were only one experimental group. Pre-test and post-test were conducted for assessing how much students achieved from what had been taught. The study concludes with the result that students’ achievement in post-test compare to pre-test revealed significant improvement. Also, scaffolding students’ writings through writing process approach met the students’ needs in EFL writing, and then it has improved their writing skill, while most of them have had difficultly in the basic elements of writing, e.g. grammar. In addition, learners could more confidentially express their ideas in their writings.

Keywords: Scaffolding, writing process approach.