Focused Freewriting, Tchart, or Group Debate: Effects of Prewriting Conditions on EFL Argumentative Writing

The study investigated how different prewriting instructions support English as a Foreign Language student writers in their generation of arguments and therefore improved the quality of text and self-efficacy in writing. Participants included 142 Vietnamese students at the upper-intermediate level in English. Three forms of prewriting interventions including focused freewriting, Tchart, and group debate were examined on five argumentation strategies, text quality, and writing self-efficacy. In a three-group pretest-posttest design with three experimental panels, one prewriting intervention was tested in comparison to the other two interventions, and the sequence effects of the order of the three prewriting instructions could also be tested. Mixed model analyses yielded two main results. First, global quality and writing self-efficacy were significantly influenced by the type of prewriting conditions. Second, about the sequence effect, an individual-based prewriting instruction, if placed after a group-based instruction, could consistently support students in global quality and variation of types of argumentation strategies. We discuss the questions of the pros and cons of the research design and the scaffolding function of the prewriting instructions in the last part of the paper.