Language Testing in Focus: An International Journal

The present study essayed to investigate the impact of collaborative pre-writing discussions on three aspects of writing skill namely, complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF). To reach this goal, 60 intermediate male EFL learners ranging from 22 to 28 years at Shahid Beheshti Language Center in Tehran, Iran participated in the study. For the purpose of homogeneity, the standardized English Proficiency Test (Preliminary English Test) was administered to 88 students and they were divided into two intact experimental and control groups. The experimental group, which was divided into six groups of five was exposed to and performed on a-40- minute essay writing tasks held two sessions per week lasting ninety-minutes for ten weeks with collaborative pre-writing discussions. Moreover, the students in experimental group were required to complete a questionnaire at the end of the study to find out about their feelings regarding prewriting discussions prior to writing in L2. The control group received the same materials and teacher as experimental group, except for, there was no collaborative pre-writing discussions to write the essays. After the raters were trained and familiarized with the rating process, the essays by both groups were collected and scored holistically based on the assessment measure provided to the two raters. In order to provide plausible answers to the research questions posed above, a series of one way ANOVA was employed to evaluate the participants' overall performance in the two conditions. The results indicated that collaborative pre-writing discussions were superior to mainstream methods. Thus, the findings can have an immediate implication for EFL teachers and practitioners who are searching for cutting edge ways of developing EFL learners' writing performance.