An Evaluation of A Suggested Instructional Writing Model in Freshmen English Writing Classes in Iran

The curriculum for teaching undergraduate university students in Iran majoring in English generally includes paragraph writing during the third semester and essay writing (4-5 paragraphs) during the fifth semester. In spite of their titles, the firstyear ‘Grammar & Writing (I & II)’ courses offered in the first and second semesters cover grammar only and rarely go beyond sentence-level writing in support of the newly taught grammar. This policy has created a gap between writing and other language skills, making it difficult for these students to deal with the demanding writing tasks such as extended writing assignments and projects later in their academic or professional life. In addition, the syllabus for writing courses, offered during the second and third years, is product-based, which has deprived students of the opportunities to engage in meaningful writing activities and to receive effective and efficient feedback on their work. The current study, however, challenges the delay in teaching writing as well as the use of traditional approaches in writing classes, describing and evaluating a teaching intervention within the process genre approach in freshmen English translation writing classes. Both quantitative and qualitative data collection instruments including pre- and posttests, pre- and post-intervention questionnaires, timed writing tasks, semi-structured interviews, and observation notes were employed during different phases of the study to gain insights into students’ engagement with this instruction, and to triangulate the data collected from different sources. The instruction for each semester (16 weeks) was designed based on a three-session (modeling, composing, and feedback) modular instructional model that focused on helping students write within four rhetorical modes: descriptive, narrative, process, and cause and effect. The analysis of data from different sources revealed that students made a significant development in the fluency, accuracy, and quality of their writing over the course of the study. The results also indicated a significant change in students’ attitudes towards writing as well as their acquisition and use of effective writing strategies at both paragraph and essay levels. In particular, students perceived feedback, the incorporation of samples and authentic reading materials, and portfolio writing as the most successful elements of this instructional writing model. The findings of this study highlighted the effectiveness of a writing intervention in first-year writing classes, and suggested that postponing writing instruction per se until the second year is questionable and that applying an eclectic approach to writing pedagogy may better compensate for students’ needs and contextual deficiencies. In addition, the findings imply that the use of more post-product writing approaches can promote the integration of reading and writing skills and therefore support learning other language learning areas such as vocabulary, grammar, and reading. These findings could inform similar EFL contexts with respect to the consideration of a writing curriculum and pedagogy commensurate with students’ real needs in academic writing. Keywords: instructional writing model, process genre approach, curriculum design, writing pedagogy, writing assessment, feedback, portfolio writing, EFL, Iran