The effects of collaborative process and collaborative product approaches to writing on 7th grade students' writing performance in online environment

Writing is one of the important but unfortunately neglected skills in learning a foreign language. The significance of having the ability to write in a second or foreign language for academic purposes has become more important for the student's future careers recently. This study aimed to design a foreign language writing instruction to answer the question that whether the implication of the Collaborative Product or Process Approach to Writing in a private secondary school's writing classes makes a positive impact on students' writing performance. The study was conducted with 73 7th-grade students in a private secondary school in İstanbul and designed as a quasi-experimental study. The treatment or implication of the Collaborative Process Approach to Writing to Experimental Group 1, the Collaborative Product Approach to Writing to Experimental Group 2 and the regular treatment was conducted in the control group. The treatment period lasted 12 weeks via Zoom sessions because of the pandemic. Both the experimental and the control groups conducted a publicly open-source B1 Pre (PET) Writing Test as a pretest and also a posttest which was utilized as the data collection tool. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was conducted to perform pretest-posttest analysis where the pretest was used as a covariate to remove the possible effects of the pretest (covariant) from the dependent variable (posttest). The results taken from ANCOVA showed statistically significant differences between the post-test scores of the students in both groups. However, these statistics didn't explain which pair of means were significant. Therefore, the Post-Hoc Bonferroni test was computed to identify significant pairs of means. As the results indicate, there was a significant difference between the posttest scores of students in favour of Experimental Group 1 (Collaborative Process Approach to Writing).