The Effect of Cooperative Work in Writing Activities on Developing the Arabic Linguistic Competence of the Tenth Grade Students at Housha Secondary School for Boys in Jordan

Abstract

This study aimed at investigating the effect of cooperative work in writing activities on developing the Arabic linguistic competence of the 10^th grade students at Housha Secondary School for Boys in Mafraq city in Jordan. The purposeful sample included the 15 10^th grade students who were pre and post tested in writing. They were asked to do the writing activities in Arabic composition in groups of three in each one through the whole second semester during the academic year 2014/2015. The writing products of the students were corrected and the researcher used descriptive statistics to find out the means and standard deviations for both tests; T-Test was also used to determine the statistical significance. The errors in using the components of the linguistic competence were counted in each test and percentages were calculated for the purpose of comparison. The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the writing performance of the participants in the pre and post tests which means that there was a positive effect of cooperative work on developing the Arabic linguistic competence. Moreover, the number of errors related to the linguistic competence decreased in the post test due to the strategy of peer work. The researcher presented some recommendations and implications based on the given results.

Keywords: Cooperative work, Writing activities, Linguistic competence, Housha Secondary School for Boys.