A STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF BLOGS IN EFL PROCESS/GENRE-BASED WRITING CLASSROOMS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH COLLEGE STUDENTS’ WRITING STRATEGIES

Abstract

The purposes of this quasi-experimental study were to examine the effects of the integration of the process/genre approach (hereafter cited as PGA) and blog on EFL college students’ writing development, and the changes of the use of writing strategies. A total of thirty-four second-year English major undergraduates who were randomly labelled as the control and experimental groups took part in this eight-week programme. An English writing essay and the questionnaires were completed in both the pre-test and post-test to contribute to accumulating quantitative data, while the observations and interviews provided qualitative data. The quantitative data was computed by applying IBM SPSS statistics to find the differences as well as the correlations, while the qualitative data was interpreted by myself to explore possible reasons and explanations to support the quantitative outcomes and to answer the research questions.

The difference test revealed that there were statistically significant differences on the participants’ English writing performances in both groups. There were some statistically significant differences in terms of the students’ perceptions of the PGA in both groups, as well as perceptions of the blog writing in the experimental group. However, neither the control group nor the experimental group showed significant differences in terms of the use of writing strategies after the treatments. The correlation tests also indicated significant different correlations between the two groups in which the results in the experimental group had greater significances.

In terms of the qualitative research findings, several obstacles had been found to be considered before conducting this type of class. However, encouraging feedback regarding the instruction had been indicated by the students to explain how they perceived the application of the PGA as well as blogs in their writing classrooms, and how the instruction developed their English writing competence.