A suggested approach to improve writing skills of students at turkish military academy

Writing skill has come to fore as a critical skill in almost every sphere of education and social life. There have been different approaches and techniques toward writing instruction and assessment in conjunction with the development of various learning theories shaping the principles of language teaching. In spite of the significant improvements in teaching writing skill stemming from these approaches and techniques, there still exists a gap to bridge between the students? and teachers? expectations of quality writing. This problem is brought about by the lack of common terminology defining the requirements of quality writing with clear-cut definitions in both instruction and assessment of writing.In 1980?s, the pursuit of a better writing instruction and assessment approach than the standard, holistic assessment system resulted in the development of 6+1 Trait Writing model which provides a means to obtain accurate, reliable and useful information about students? writing performance and to instruct accordingly.6+1 Trait Writing model, a trait based model linking instruction to assessment in a process-based approach to writing, specifies the features of quality writing and establishes the teaching model by teaching of these seven essential traits: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, mechanics and presentation.The purpose of this study is to determine the efficacy of 6+1 Trait Writing model on the improvement of writing skills of the students in writing courses. A small-scale research with a pretest-posttest control group design has been carried out on 46 freshmen studying at Turkish Military Academy in 2007. The students in the treatment group were instructed according to the procedures of 6+1 Trait Writing model while the students in the control group received their writing instruction in the way they had in the past. The analysis of the data indicated that the students in the treatment group seemed to have improved their scores in the writing traits tested at the end of the training. In conclusion, 6+1 Traits of Writing model is considered to be effective in improving students? success in writing courses.