Effect of pre-writing activities on writing motivation and writing success

Purpose of the study is to determine the effect of applied pre-writing activities on secondary school students' writing motivation and writing success. Because of aiming to compare the basic behaviors of before experiment with the ones of after experiment, pretest posttest control group quasi-experimental model is used in the study. In this context, brainstorming, clustering, concept maps, question-answer, discussion, sample text, problem solving, fishbone, drama, visuals, music listening, videos, newspaper clippings and advertisements, listing, cubing activities are apllied to total 5 groups with groups of three students. The study groups consist of ten classes (experiment groups of 5 classes, control groups of 5 classes) of 8th grade students of two schools in Gaziantep Province. "Scale of Writing Motivation" and " Rubric of Analysing Planning Skills in Writing Expression" developed by the researcher are used to collect data. Scale of writing motivation consists of 7 dimensions as objective, attitude, self-efficacy, self regulation, attribution (finding reason), effort, anxiety and 37 items. Scale validity was ensured with expert opinion and factor analysis. For scale reliability, reliability analysis was applied and cronbach alpha coefficient was found as ,80. Rubric of analysing planning skills in writing expression consisted of 7 dimensions as title, topic, main idea and supporting details, phrasology and ways of the improving the idea, introduction, body, and conclusion, and Items were ranked as very good (5), good (4), moderate (3), poor (2), very poor (1) in 5 point likert scale. While writing skills of students in experiment group show a significant difference between the pretest and posttest, writing skills of students in control group did not show a significant difference between the pretest and posttest. However, averages of pretest-posttest of both experimental group and control group did not showed a significant difference. This result emerged that pre-writing activities increased students writing success but they were not effective in increasing their writing motivation. While "videos, newspaper clippings, concept map" were the techniques and methods which increase students' motivation the most, "discussion, listing, fishbone" did not increase motivation significantly, yet they increased the motivation. As it is recommended that visual based techniques and methods must be used more frequently to increase students' wiriting success, that teachers need long term activities to increase writing motivation is emphasized.