College of Languages Awards its First Ph.D. Degree in English [Archives:2003/652/Education]

Abstract by Dr. Mohamed O. Naif
On Sunday July 6, 2003, the College of Languages, University of Sana'a awarded its first Ph.D. degree in English to Mohamed Mohammed Othman Naif, Lecturer of English Language, College of Languages. The examination committee consisted of:

1) Professor A. K. Sharma, Head of the English Department College of Languages, University of Sana'a (the research supervisor and head of the examination committee).
2) Professor D. K. M. Tiwari, Head of the English Department, College of Education, University of Taiz (external examiner)
3) Professor Abdul-Rahman Abdrabou, senior professor of English, College of Arts, University of Sana'a (internal examiner)

The following abstract summarizes the experimental study which was conducted for the above-mentioned Ph.D. thesis. It gives a brief account of the problem of the study, the hypotheses, the data gathering techniques, and the main findings and conclusions:

A Study of Yemeni EFL College Student Writers' Composition Strategies and Skills

Abstract
The problem of this quasi-experimental study is “Yemeni EFL college student writers lack composition strategies and skills and interest in writing”. In order to investigate this problem, it was hypothesized that (1) Yemeni EFL college student writers transfer their lack of composition strategies and skills into their L2 context, (2) Yemeni EFL college student writers who are trained explicitly to utilize the Process/Fluency (P/F) approach would have higher scores than those who are trained to utilize the Traditional Writing Instruction (TWI), (3) Yemeni EFL college student writers who are trained explicitly to utilize the P/F approach would have positive attitudes toward writing, and (4) the P/F approach compensates for the Yemeni EFL college student writers' lack of previous systematic writing instruction on prewriting, drafting, and revising strategies in L1 and L2 at schools and universities. The study proposed the P/F approach to help Yemeni EFL college student writers develop composition strategies and skills such as prewriting, drafting, and revising, and writing fluency techniques such as daily journal writing and free-writing to change their negative attitudes toward writing. Four data gathering techniques were utilized to collect data for the study; namely, pretest and posttest, open-ended questionnaire, observations, and post-treatment interviews.
The study sample consisted of 60 students divided into two equal groups (“B” and “E”), studying at level one, semester two of the academic year (2000/2001), at the College of Languages, University of Sana'a, Yemen. Group “B” represented the control group (G2) and group “E” represented the experimental group (G1) of the study.
Before beginning the treatment, the subjects of both groups were given a writing proficiency test as a pretest in which they had to write a letter and a paragraph. Once the pretest was finished, the two groups received 25 hours of classroom instruction for ten weeks. The P/F approach was utilized with the experimental group and the TWI was utilized with the control group. When the treatment was completed, the subjects of both groups sat for a writing proficiency test as the posttest at the same time and under the same conditions.
Shortly before administering the posttest, the subjects of the experimental group responded to an open-ended questionnaire designed to investigate: (1) the subjects' attitudes toward the usefulness and effectiveness of the P/F approach in teaching composition strategies and skills, and (2) to find out if the fluency techniques such as daily journal writing and free-writing improved the subjects' wiring fluency and changed their previously held negative attitudes toward writing.
Ten observations of EFL writing classes were conducted to investigate what kind of writing approaches and classroom practices were commonly utilized in teaching EFL writing to English specialists at the College of Arts, the College of Education and the College of Languages at the University of Sana'a.
A year and a half after the completion of the experiment, post-treatment interviews were conducted randomly with two of the experimental group subjects. The interviews were aimed at investigating if the subjects were still using the composition strategies and skills that they had acquired during the experiment and if such strategies influenced their writing performance in Arabic.
The data collected through the pretest and the posttest, the open-ended questionnaire, the observations, and the post-treatment interviews supported the four hypotheses of the study. The pretest and the posttest scores of each group were compared for significance using a t-test. The results indicated no significant difference between the control group's pretest and posttest scores. However, a statistically significant difference was found between the pretest and the posttest of the experimental group at 0.05 level in favor of the posttest. The results of the posttest indicated that the experimental group acquired writing strategies such as prewriting, drafting, and revising and produced significantly better writing assignments than the control group. The experimental group made significant improvement in eight of the ten writing components utilized in evaluating the subjects' pretest and posttest, whereas the control group made no improvement in seven of the ten writing components. Furthermore, the data obtained from the analysis of the questionnaire supported the results of the pretest and posttest. All the subjects of the experimental group (100%) responded positively to the usefulness of the P/F approach in developing their writing abilities and changing their previously held negative attitudes toward writing.
The findings of the observations indicated that the most dominant approach for teaching writing is the TWI which mainly focuses on the finished product and surface/local aspects of composition. Finally, the findings of the post-treatment interviews indicated that the two subjects of the experimental group were still using the composition strategies and skills they learned during the experiment and that their training in English positively influenced their writing in Arabic.
Based on the analysis and discussion of the findings obtained through the four different data gathering techniques mentioned above, it is concluded that the P/F approach, consisting of process composition strategies (i.e. prewriting, drafting, and revising strategies) and writing fluency techniques (i.e. daily journal writing and free-writing), was successful in helping the Yemeni EFL college student writers become skilled writers through acquiring effective composition strategies and skills, and change their previously held negative attitudes toward writing. Thus, the proposed approach (i.e. the Process/Fluency approach) can be successfully implemented at the college level in Yemen to enable EFL college student writers to utilize successful composition strategies and skills and become interested in writing activities.
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[archive-e:652-v:13-y:2003-d:2003-07-21-p:education]