The Effect of Conventional, Web-based, and Hybrid Teaching of Pre ...

Intl. Res. J. Appl. Basic. Sci. Vol., 4 (2), 393-401, 2013ended question seeking to find out whether any of the students was versed in pre-writing strategies or not and sixstudents from the four groups were excluded from the study for their familiarity with pre-writing strategies.Instruments and Their ReliabilityAs it went before, a homogenizing writing test (which also served as the pretest) and a posttest were usedas data elicitation techniques of this study. The two writing tests featured argumentative prompts. The text typesthey elicited were enumerative texts of cause-and-effect type. More precisely, the writing prompt for the pretest andposttest were “Do you think that most marriages in Iran are successful nowadays or not? Provide reasons for youranswer,” and “Poverty in Iran is on the rise. Do you agree or disagree? Provide reasons for your answer,”respectively.These two writing tests were scored independently by the three researchers according to the followingchecklist: (a) Does the writing have a topic sentence? (b) Does it include detailed supporting sentences? (c) Doesit have unity? (d) Does it have coherence? (e) Does it include transitions at the critical locations? (f) Does it have aconcluding remark at the end? (g) Does the writer have good diction? (h) Has the writer kept to grammatical andorthographic rules? (i) Is the writing neatly done and easy to read? (j) Is it interesting and convincing?Each of the ten items above weighed two points. A writing test, as such, would have a score between zeroand twenty. Correlational analyses showed an inter-rater reliability of 0.84 and 0.91 for the pretest and posttestscores, respectively.ProcedureIn the light of administering an argumentative writing test, from among male and female students studyingEnglish at Islamic Azad University of Shahrekord, and Safahan Institute of Higher Education, a group ofhomogenous EFL writers was selected to serve as the participants of the study. These students were subsequentlydivided into three experimental groups and a control group at random.While the control group (CtrlG) underwent a product-oriented writing class where they were required towrite on different topics and provided with feedback on the content, structure, and organization of what they wrote,one of the experimental groups (ConG) was exposed to conventional pre-writing strategies instruction, and thesecond experimental group (WBG) to web-based pre-writing strategies instruction. The last experimental group(HG) experienced pre-writing strategies instruction in a hybrid environment where they were taught the lesson inclass and had to do the follow-up activities online. These three experimental groups experienced a processorientedstrategies-based instruction based on Grenfell and Harris’s (1999) model of strategic instruction. That is,the following steps were respectively taken in order to teach them pre-writing strategies: awareness raising,modeling, general practice, action planning, focused practice, and evaluation. The intervention phase of the studywas completed in 7 sessions since each of the pre-writing strategies of freewriting, brainstorming, listing, clustering,and wh-questions was taught in one session two sessions were allocated to the administration of the pretest andposttest. The instructional materials for both WBG and HG were on http://sajadshafiee.blogfa.com. The contents ofthe courses were password-protected. This would make it possible for either of the WBG and HG to gain access tothe relevant content, not to the material intended for the other group.Data AnalysisIt was explained before that a homogenizing writing test (which also served as the pretest of the study) wasadministered to select a comparable sample from among male and female students majoring in English at IslamicAzad University of Shahrekord and Safahan Institute of Higher Education. This sample consisted of threeexperimental groups and a control group. To ascertain their homogeneity prior to the experiment, a one-waybetween-groups ANOVA was run to compare their performance on this test. The same statistical tool was usedagain for comparing the posttest results. The results of these analyses are presented in the following section.RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONThe aim of the present study was two-fold: to find out whether teaching pre-writing strategies is an effectivepractice in writing classes, and to figure out the possible difference between different ways of input delivery(conventional, web-based, and hybrid instruction). To make sure the participants in the control group and the threeexperimental groups (ConG, WBG, and HG) were at the same level of writing ability prior to the experiment, a onewaybetween-groups ANOVA was conducted. The following table displays the descriptive results of comparingthese groups.398