The Effect of Multi-step Oral-revision Processes on Iranian EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writing Achievement

The Effect of Multi-step Oral-revision Processes on Iranian EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writing Achievement

Farrokhlagha Heidari[1]

University of Sistan and Baluchestan

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of two multi-step oral-revision processes as feedback providing tools on Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement. The participants taking part in this study were 45 Iranian EFL students who were randomly assigned into three groups. The participants of the groups were given three argumentative writing assignments, each assignment demanding three separate drafts. In the control group, the participants revised their essays in response to teacher's written feedback, while the participants of the two experimental groups experienced oral-revision talks with their teacher or a peer. Two sets of quantitative and qualitative data were collected: Argumentative essays written at the beginning and the end of the semester and interviews. The results of the quantitative aspect of the study revealed the significant outperformance of the two experimental groups. Moreover, the data provided through interviews revealed some differences in terms of the effectiveness of feedback between the two experimental groups. The participants of the peer-led group reported more awareness of the rhetorical structures and an ability to revise surface errors. While, the teacher-led group reported more global writing concerns like content, organization of ideas,   and discourse. The obtained results point out that the mutual co-construction of participation roles and certain combinations of negotiation and scaffolding let the teacher provide a supportive conversational environment and assistance in accordance with the proficiency of learners of the teacher-led group to promote greater learner participation.

Keywords: Multi-step Oral Revision, Negotiation, Scaffolding, Argumentative Writing   

A great concern for many EFL researchers and teachers has always been to create an ideal teaching/learning environment. The goals set out by language curriculums clearly indicate the shift of teaching English as an academic subject to teaching English as a means of communication (Keh, 1990). Writing skills are also considered to be different from what they used to be - rewriting, paraphrasing, and translating from source language (SL) to target language (TL) or from TL to SL. Recently, the construct of academic writing has begun to change in a way that allows students to demonstrate their ability as they engage fully in processes through brainstorming, drafting, and revising in response to teacher or peer feedback (Camp, 1993). Writing is now a meaningful, social act and a problem-solving activity (Kroll, 1990).

The paradigm shift from product-oriented approach to a process-oriented one towards writing, demands teachers to look for new and alternative feedback providing tools. Collaborative problem-solving, brainstorming, shared planning, multiple drafts, peer feedback, and revision have all been suggested as relevant activities within a cycle of process writing (Keh, 1990; Seow, 2002). As the new trend gained ground in the classroom, teachers encouraged or required their students to write multiple drafts of their papers, and explored various ways of providing feedback to help students revise as they moved on the various drafts onto the eventual end product.

Furthermore, the most recent view of learning to write also stresses the role of social interaction, recognizing that "negotiation and collaboration aid the internalization of cognitive and linguistic skills, thus leading to improved writing ability" (Lockhart & Ng, 1995, p. 606).

Oral conferences, as one form of feedback providing tools, allow us to form a learning partnership in which students and teachers can become collaborators, co-creating meaning in an ongoing dialogic process (Young & Miller, 2004). Though many of us see the potential for a true change in classroom learning through oral conferences, there is little in our own educational settings to support us in transforming the traditional feedback providing practices in our writing classes in Iran.

Theoretical and Empirical Background

L1 composition research has long viewed writing as a means of discovery of one’s ideas and thoughts to construct coherent texts (Pajares & Valiante, 2006).  L2 teachers and researchers likewise consider writing in a second language as a nonlinear, generative process in which learners identify thoughts, reformulate them, and express meaning (Zamel, 1983).

A crucial component in the development of L1 and L2 writing skills is revision, which is a complex process carried out with varying degrees of success depending upon the writer’s competence and the nature of the received feedback ( Hedgcock & Leftkowitz, 1992). Between- draft intervention has widely shown to lead to significant improvement in L1 and L2 writing performance. While it is widely accepted that oral interaction has an important role to play in the planning, writing or revision stages of producing a text in L1 contexts (Bruffee, 1984), the scope and extent of its contribution are still unclear, especially to L2 writers.

Goldstein and Conrad (1990) evaluated the effectiveness of teacher-led oral revisions and concluded that only those students who negotiated meaning successfully in conferences were able to carry out extensive and better revisions to their writing. This finding was supported by Williams (2004) who found greater uptake of tutor advice in terms of revisions when tutor suggestions were explicit, when students actively participated and negotiated in the conferences, and when they wrote down their plans during the sessions they had with tutors.

In another study, Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1992) investigated the effectiveness of oral revision process versus the instructor’s supplied written feedback in a foreign language context. The results revealed that the essays produced by the oral revision group received higher components and overall scores than the other group.

Contributing to the literature, Goldberg, Roswell, and Michaels (1995) examined the effect of peer response and revision on texts within a multi-day testing format. Contrary to their expectations, the results of their study showed that there were generally limited revisions to rough drafts and minimal score improvements from rough to final drafts.

Patthey-Chavez and Ferris (1997) examined four teachers' writing conferences with a weaker and a more able student and linked the topics discussed in the conferences to student revision of their drafts. They found that all eight students incorporated the teachers' suggestions in their revisions, but the weaker students tended to follow advice far more closely. More able students were more assertive and confident and often used the teachers' suggestions as a starting point for their own changes.

Jones, Garrulda, and Lock (2006) reported the results of a study on face-to-face peer-tutoring. Results showed that face-to-face interactions involved hierarchical encounters with tutors taking control of the discourse and focusing on issues of grammar, vocabulary and style.

          Zhao (2010) conducted a comparative study on the effectiveness of peer and teacher feedback on the revision processes of students. The findings suggested that the learners used more teacher than peer feedback in their consequent drafts. However, interviews with learners revealed that they used a larger proportion of teacher feedback without understanding its significance or value.

More pertinently, several studies have focused specifically on the ways that meaning is negotiated in conferences (Weissberg, 2006; Williams, 2002, 2004) and the effects of these negotiations on students' revisions of their texts (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994; Goldstein & Conrad, 1990). Another focus has been on power and control of the conferences dialogue, including aspects such as the roles of the participants, the length of turns, who initiates topics and the relative percentage of the dialogue contributed by tutors and students (Powers, 1993; Weigle & Nelson, 2004). These studies suggest that control of most L2 interactions remains firmly in the hands of the tutors, despite the collaborative ideals of the writing conferences.

A key concept in many studies is the Vygotskian concept of scaffolding. This concept, also known as 'assisted performance' (Ohta, 2001), 'negotiated interaction' (Long, 1996), and 'guided participation' (Lave & Wenger,1991), encompasses the ways that the feedback delivered through the dialogue between teacher or fellow learner and student can enable the student to develop both his or her text and writing abilities (Williams, 2002). Vygotsky (1986) argues that language is fundamentally social, generated and organized through continual negotiation of meaning among individuals none of them belong to precisely the same social groups. His argument suggests that providing novice writers with the experience of how to respond, individually or interactively, to texts written by the student is an element of the teaching of writing. Vygotsky's empirical research and theory focusing on the transition from social, or interpsychological, to intrapsyhological mental processes within small groups suggests that well-designed small groups can play a significant role in written language learning. However, despite the wide use of this term in the literature, it still remains a rather abstract concept.

Although the skill of argumentation has long been recognized as essential in academic settings of various levels (Nemeth & Kormos, 2001), a number of studies have indicated that most EFL university students lack preparation for English argumentative writing and perform inadequately on this mode of writing (Varghese & Abraham, 1998). Therefore, a need is felt to search for and examine the efficacy of some other forms of corrective feedback rather than teacher’s written comments on EFL learners’ argumentative essay writing. Despite the fact that teacher and peer feedback, and required revision, is a common component of the process-approach in English as second language writing classroom, few empirical studies have investigated the effects of a collaborative oral revision-based method on a specific mode of writing in the foreign language context. Considering the prime role of continuous feedback and the pivotal importance of planning, control, reflection and revision in writing, this study attempts to answer the following questions using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods.

1. Do multi-step oral revision processes have any impact on Iranian EFL learners' argumentative writing achievement?

2. How do the participants of the teacher-led and peer-led oral revision groups evaluate the effectiveness of feedback on their subsequent revisions?

Method

Participants

The overall participants taking part in this study were 45 Iranian EFL students (25 males and 20 females) aged between 20 and 24 majoring in English Literature or Translation at University of Sistan and Baluchestan. Due to certain limitations, the subjects were not randomly selected; in fact all subjects enrolling for Advanced Writing were included in the study. McBurney (2001) calls such samples 'convenience samples', "a random sample that is chosen for practical reasons" (p. 246). This kind of sampling, he later adds, is quite acceptable. The participants were randomly assigned into three groups each consisting of 15 participants.

Instrumentation

• Pre-test and Post-test Argumentative Essay Writing

At the beginning and at the end of a three-month semester, the students were provided with opportunities to write two argumentative essays on different topics functioning as pre-test and post-test of this study (for topics see Appendix A). The topics were selected from the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (OVRC) database (http://www.gale.cengage.com/pdf/facts/ovrc.pdf). These helped the researcher to investigate the impact of the treatments shown through the performance of the control and experimental groups.

• Scoring scale

The Multiple Trait Scoring proposed by Hamp-Lyons (1992) was used for assessing the students' writings. Hamp-Lyons (1992) states that The Multiple Trait Scoring implies giving separate scores for more than one facet or trait on any single essay. She adds that this approach is very different from the old analytic scoring which focused on relatively trivial features of text (i.e., grammar, spelling, handwriting) and which did indeed reduce writing to an activity apparently composed of countable units strung together. In other words, Multiple Trait Scoring is an approach to the whole writing assessment and not only the scoring (Hamp-Lyons, 1992). Based on the Hamp-Lyons' (1991) Multiple Trait Assessment, a group rather than a single expert were employed to take into account the specific context and a range of levels appropriate to the context. The raters decided on six criteria (the nature of ideas, reasonable context, development of specifics, text structure, control of the language use, and communication effectiveness), all of which were both scored and ideally reported. The actual scoring involved two raters for each text, with a third one if those two disagreed. The reported scores were the averages of the two ratings that were closer together. The two raters' scores were averaged to arrive at the final, single-number score for research use. Inter-rater reliabilities computed using Cronbach’s alpha were high for the pre-test (.78) and post-test (.81).  

• Interview

The researcher randomly interviewed 10 participants, 5 participants of each of the experimental groups (teacher-led & peer-led group) to gain further insight into the effectiveness of these feedback providing tools and the most frequently revised aspects of language in their writing. The interview comprised three questions as follows:

 (1) Do you think that writing multiple drafts on the same topic is helpful for improving your writing? Why?

 (2) Do you think that the type of negotiation of ideas you have experienced for revising your essays during this semester is beneficial for improving your writing ability in general? Whom do you prefer to receive feedback from, teacher or peer?

(3) Which aspects of language (lexical, grammar, content, discourse, organization of ideas, and others) were revised more frequently after receiving feedback from your teacher/peer?  

Procedure

After randomly assigning the participants into the three groups (i.e., control, teacher-led, and peer-led group) each consisting of 15 students, participants in the two experimental groups as well as those of the control group were asked to write an argumentative essay, functioning as the pre-test in this study. Its aim was to check the homogeneity of the three groups in writing at the outset of the experiment.

Then throughout the three-month semester including 18 sessions, all participants were required to write 3 argumentative writing assignments on the assigned topics (Appendix B), each demanding 3 separate drafts. The participants of the three groups received different feedback methods on their essays: In the control group, the students' writings were collected by their teacher and the students received feedback in the form of some written comments. The key difference between the control and the two experimental groups was that in the teacher-led group the participants had oral revision talks with their teacher and in the peer-led group they received oral feedback from a peer. It should be mentioned that revision was a major component of the pedagogy in this research and participants were required to incorporate feedback into their own revision processes.

In the teacher-led oral revision group, the emphasis was on the interactional processes by which the discursive practices are co-constructed by participants. Discursive practices are recurring episodes of face-to-face interaction, episodes that have social significance for a community of speakers and writers (Hanks, 1991). In this group, before each writing conference, each student wrote a draft of an essay on a topic assigned by the instructor, and, during revision talk, the instructor and student identified problem areas in the student's writing, talked about ways to improve the writing, and revised the text. The instructor displayed a preference for having the students identify problems themselves and self-correcting them. In other words, the students had to take active roles by identifying problems, by providing explanations for revisions, and by writing revisions in accordance with the instructor’s directive.

In the peer-led oral revision group, revision took place between each participant and a peer, with student reading his/her essay aloud to the peer, who was provided with photocopies of the student’s original essays. The interlocutors were supposed to respond orally according to a written protocol.

To provide answers to the qualitative question of this study i.e. How do the participants of the teacher-led and peer-led oral revision groups evaluate the effectiveness of feedback on their subsequent revisions?, the researcher randomly selected five participants from each of the two experimental groups (10 altogether) to find out their opinions about the effectiveness of the received feedback.

Finally, at the end of the course all participants were asked to write an argumentative essay, functioning as the post-test of the study. The scoring procedure for the post-test was quite similar to that of the pre-test. The control and experimental groups were compared on the basis of their mean scores.

Results

Groups’ writing achievement

  Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of the pre-test and post-test scores.

Table 1

Descriptive Statistics of Pre-test and Post-test Scores

As Table 1 indicates the mean scores of the three groups on pre-test (ranging from 12.73-12.90) are almost similar; however, a One-way ANOVA was performed to check the homogeneity of the three groups in writing at the outset of the experiment. As the results of Table 2 reveal, F (2, 42) = .043, p

Table 2

One-way ANOVA Results for Pre-test Scores

Addressing the first research question of the study concerning the impact of the treatments on participants’ argumentative writing achievement, the statistical test of One-way ANOVA was carried out on the post-test scores of the three groups (Table 3).

Table 3

One-wayANOVA Results for Post-test Scores

As the results of table 3 present, F (2, 42) = 23.013, p

In order to find the location of differences, a Post-hoc Scheffe test was performed. The results are presented in Table 4.

Table 4

Post-hoc Scheffe Test, Multiple Comparisons for the Post-test

The mean difference is significant at the .05 level.

The mean differences reported in Table 4 indicate that the most significant difference lies between the performance of the teacher-led oral revision group (M= 16.56) and that of the control group (M= 13.06). Based on the mean differences between the control group and the two experimental groups, it is evident that both experimental groups outperformed the control group. Moreover, the mean differences between the two experimental groups indicate that the teacher-led group (M= 16.56) outperformed the peer-led group (M= 15.36), but the difference is not a statistically significant one. The control group revealed the least of all improvements that can be attributed to the lack of appropriate feedback and passiveness of the participants.

Interview Results

This part of research reports on how the participants of the two oral revision groups evaluated the effectiveness of the oral teacher-led and peer-led revisions on their subsequent writings. As mentioned earlier, five participants from each of the two experimental groups were randomly selected to reflect on the effectiveness of the received feedback.

It seems that the students have recognized the fact that multiple drafts and more opportunities for revision help them move through the stages of writing process toward the final end product. It means that these students have come to see themselves as writers- active writers. All interviewees talked about enjoying discerning the differences between their first and final drafts and, importantly, assuming increased responsibility for their own learning and taking ownership of their own work. One of the participants reported that:

Comparing my first drafts with my final essays, I discerned how different they were and how revision had helped me to improve my writing.

Furthermore, they asserted that their improvement was due to the fact that they had to take active roles and to orally defend their position. The subjects believed that collaboration and close teacher-student or student-student interaction helped them gain control over their composing skills and make use of the full potential of feedback in their writing classes. The subjects reported that since in oral-revisions they had face-to-face interaction, there was no ambiguity in terms of teacher's/peer’s comments; therefore, tutor's suggestions were explicit to the students who actively participated and negotiated in the conferences. One of the interviewees reflected on her experience in this way:

This was a totally different experience in my academic life. I was never satisfied with the assigned grades to my compositions and in most cases I didn’t get what my teacher means with his/her comments. During this course I had the great chance of face-to-face speaking with my teacher. I was less confused and more pleased!

The writers also emphasized the importance of collaboration as a powerful learning tool promoting interaction between reader and writer, increasing dialog and negotiation, and heightening the writers' sense of partnership. They stated that collaboration moved them from the traditional passive stance of receiving knowledge from an authority to an active involvement which makes talk integral to writing.

Furthermore, the students mentioned that although their participation was quite limited at the outset of the oral-conferences, during the last conferences they felt moving from peripheral to fuller participation and taking more active roles. In the teacher-led group, the learners came to view the instructor not merely as a grader looking for errors, but as a writing coach eager to help them through their composition courses. One of the participants of the teacher-led group talked about his experience expressing these sentences:

To be honest, during the first conferences I was quite silent and depressed! The more we talked about my mistakes, the more stressful I was, worrying about my grade. To my surprise, grades were not so much important, actually no grade was assigned to my essays during the course!! Later on, I enjoyed having opportunity to talk to my reader about what I meant.

However, the data provided through interviews revealed some differences in terms of the effectiveness of feedback between the two experimental groups. The participants of the peer-led group reported more awareness of the rhetorical structures and an ability to revise surface errors. The learners of this group reported that the feedback they received for revising their essays were mainly concerned with correcting their lexical (selecting words, phrases and expressions), grammatical (tense, verb endings, articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs), punctuation, and spelling errors. The teacher-led revision group reported more global writing aspects like content (general knowledge, own experiences, evidences, counter-evidences, and supportive ideas), organization of ideas, and discourse (logical sequencing, organization of paragraphs, inter-sentential relationship, and cohesive devices).

The teacher-led group also reflected on enjoying the way the teacher started with minimal help and then gradually offering more specific assistance as needed. Learners talked about their initial reliance on the assistance of the teacher to make error corrections and eventually gaining increased independence, reconstructing their erroneous forms with little or no teacher intervention.  As far as accepting feedback was concerned, students of both groups were frank about their need for help from an expert and preferred teacher feedback to that from others, believing the teacher to be an expert and, at the same time, mistrusting the advice of peers. The teacher-led group reported on finding the teacher’s comments as highly useful and evaluated the course as their first experience of writing within a supportive, communicative context.

Discussion

This study mainly explored the impact of two multi-step oral revision processes on Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement. The findings indicate significant effects of these feedback providing procedures on learners’ achievement and the importance of students' active engagement in the learning process. The better performance of the two experimental groups provides support for the promotion of approaches in which learner involvement, learner autonomy and collaboration are major promises.

Different strategies of feedback incorporation (i.e. writing multiple drafts on the same topic and having oral conferences with the readers) throughout the students' composing process rather than a single score, seem to be responsible for the outperformance of the experimental groups. In this study corrective feedback and negotiation were contextualized as a collaborative process in which the dynamics of the interaction itself shape the nature of feedback. John Harris (1986, p. 23), an expert in assessment in higher education, believes that "improvements in instruction begin with feedback on student achievement. Such feedback is dependent on assessment, and the occasional use of outside tests is not enough."

The most important point here is that revising is not a one-shot activity. It is a process that can take place several times before learners hand in their final essay. This can be interpreted with regard to previous research findings. Camp (1993) states that timed single-draft essays without any opportunity to reflect, interact, and revise do not create an authentic writing environment. Wiggins (1994) criticized single-draft essays by lacking opportunities to get feedback during the writing process, noting that this actually contradicts the real situation, where almost always we get feedback from classmates, instructors, colleagues, or others.

Besides other things, the outperformance of the oral-revision groups provides support for the beneficial effects of negotiation and face-to-face interaction that provide students with opportunities to assume a more active role in their own learning. The obtained results are in line with Hulse-Killacky, Orr, and Paradise (2006), who asserted that corrective feedback aiming at encouraging conversation about giving, receiving, and clarifying feedback leads to better improvement.

The findings of this study are in line with Vygotsky's (1978) ZPD, which suggests that communicative collaboration with adults or more skilled peers contributes to the development of self-regulation; the capacity for independent problem-solving. It is primarily through dialog and examining different perspectives that students become knowledgeable, strategic, and self-determined. Based on the findings of this study, successful mediation of the teacher in oral-revisions helps students connect new information to their experiences and to learning in other areas. It helps them figure out what to do when they are stumped; it helps them learn how to learn. Furthermore, the sense of cooperation that is fostered in oral-conferences makes assessment less threatening in comparison to traditional classes. This, as a result, promotes teacher-student relationship, social support, and higher self-esteem and academic achievement.

The findings regarding the ideas that negotiated help provided within the learner’s ZPD is more effective than mere negotiation are compatible with Nassaji and Swain (2000), who concluded that corrective feedback within learner’s ZPD is more effective than random help. However, they found that more explicit assistance provides better results than less explicit help, when provided randomly and in a non-collaborative atmosphere.

This research also reemphasizes the importance of collaboration as a powerful learning tool which promotes interaction between reader and writer, increases dialog and negotiation, and heightens the writers' sense of reader/audience. In fact, responding in the process writing classroom is a conscious effort to sensitize the student to the presence of a real reader/audience.

To conclude, one of the revolutions sweeping through higher education is the move from teacher- to learner-centered education and the most conspicuous characteristic of learner-centered education is student engagement. It can be concluded that the environment in writing classes should be assimilated as much as possible to the real world writing practices in which there are opportunities for revising, feedback, discussion, learning, and reflection. This study, as one promising form of process-oriented writing approach, provides a potential alternative for feedback providing tool between timed single draft essays and oral-revision processes.

Although teaching and learning are essentially social activities, academic writing is often viewed “as a solitary chore involving high stress and low gain” (Tusi, 1996, p. 1). When introducing students to the process writing, the teachers need to provide not only supportive but also challenging environments encouraging interaction and emphasizing the need for audience awareness. Students must be reminded that what they write is going to be read- not just judged and scored by their teachers or peers.

Furthermore, it is evident that autonomy cannot be thrust upon learners; rather they need to be assisted towards independence. It implies that teachers must attempt to respond and provide assistance when demanded, raise or lower the scaffold according to the learners’ needs. And as Vygotsky (1878) noted and Van Lier (1996) expanded in more details, scaffolding can be affected by both teacher and peer. In short, it can be concluded that multi-step oral revision processes can provide potentially useful pedagogical insights and implications for teaching writing.

The Author

Farrokhlagha Heidari holds a Ph.D. degree in TEFL from Allameh Tabataba'i University of Tehran, Iran. She is an Assistant Professor in the University of Sistan and Baluchestan. She has authored and co-authored some research articles and has presented papers at national and international conferences. Her main areas of research include language assessment and psycholinguistics.

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Appendices

Appendix A

Pre-test topic

Write a well-organized essay on the topic below. Your essay will be graded on the nature of ideas, reasonable context, development of specifics, text structure, control of the language use, and communication effectiveness.

Some people argue that the internet has caused a lot of harm to young people. Others argue that the internet has brought a lot of benefits to young people. What is your opinion?

Post-test topic

Write a well-organized essay on the topic below. Your essay will be graded on the nature of ideas, reasonable context, development of specifics, text structure, control of the language use, and communication effectiveness.

Some people believe that genetically modified plants are dangerous to our health and to the environment. Others believe that genetic engineering is an important tool in feeding the world’s population. Which position do you support?

Appendix B

Assignment 1

Argue for or against home-school education vs. public school education.

Assignment 2

Some students argue that EFL students should be taught content courses in their native language. What is your opinion?

Assignment 3

Some people believe that computer skills should be a fundamental part of education. Do you agree?