The impact of joint construction of a process genre approach on EFL tertiary level students’ argumentative writing development

Abstract

Many studies revealed the effect of integrating process approach with genre approach, mostly implemented through a Teaching-Learning Cycle (TLC) which includes modelling, joint construction, and independent construction in developing ESL and EFL students’ writing skills, however, few empirical studies have been done to reveal the effect of individual stages of the integration. This study investigated the impact of the joint construction stage of a process genre writing teaching approach in improving students’ argumentative essay writing skills and language complexity in one Chinese private university. This study adopted a quasi-experimental design. The participants were from two intact classes totaling 62 students. The control group was taught under a process genre approach without joint construction stage, whereas the experimental group was taught under a process genre approach with joint construction. Classroom intervention lasted for three weeks, and each week consisted of four sessions, 45 minutes per session. Pre-posttests were used to collect the data. The results reveal that the process genre approach with the joint construction stage is more effective than the process genre approach without joint construction in improving students’ writing skills and syntactic complexity. However, both the PGA approaches have no effect on developing students’ lexical complexity.