Promoting writing proficiency through a reading-based method to improve EFL students’ academic achievement

Abstract

The present research aims at testing the hypothesis that increasing reading-based teaching in the subject of Written Expression with the adoption of the genre approach will boost the writing proficiency of EFL students with regard to the use of connectives, improve the quality of their writing, and hence, improve their academic achievement(scores). Special focus is placed on the use of connective expressions as markers of discourse organization, and as a source of coherence and successful communication. A questionnaire has been administered to Written Expression teachers at the beginning of the academic year 2010-2011 and a quasi-experiment has been carried out at the English department (university of Constantine 01) during a period of nine weeks. One hundred and twelve essays were collected from two groups of undergraduate students (third year) and the essays were assessed by two raters and Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of grammatical cohesion was used as the main framework for the analysis of connectives in the essays. The results of the correlation coefficient test show that there is a positive correlation between the use of connectives and the students’ scores (achievement), but connectives are not significantly correlated with the quality of the students’ essays. The results of r using Pearson correlation are 0.09 and 0.15 in the two groups’ pre-test respectively, and 0.31 and 0.39 in the post-test of group one and group two, respectively. The results of the second hypothesis, namely whether there is an alignment between what is taught and what is assessed or how it is assessed, the results of Cohen’s kappa correlation coefficient show poor results with regard to inter-raters’ agreement; the reliability of scoring is poor to average. The results of agreement ranged between 0.52 and 0.24 in the two groups’ pre-test and between 0.59 and 0.16 in the two groups’ post-test.