The Effect of Freewriting on Developing Punctuation Marks in Paragraph Writings of Iranian EFL Intermediate Learners

Freewriting is writing whatever one knows or thinks for a certain length of time without stopping and editing till the time finishes. It’s an easy and useful way of writing for generating ideas but it is sometimes full of errors. The current study examined a new area of freewriting which aimed to ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theory and practice in language studies 2018-01, Vol.8 (1), p.34-43
Main Authors: Nouri, Farzaneh, Marzban, Amir
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automatic writing
Collaboration
Composition (Language arts)
Control Groups
Editing
English (Second language)
English as a second language
Higher education
Influence
Language Skills
Learning Processes
Persian language
Poliomyelitis
Punctuation
Qualitative research
Researchers
Respondents
Second language writing
Second language writing instruction
Students
Study and teaching
Teacher education
Teaching
Writers
Writing
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Summary:Freewriting is writing whatever one knows or thinks for a certain length of time without stopping and editing till the time finishes. It’s an easy and useful way of writing for generating ideas but it is sometimes full of errors. The current study examined a new area of freewriting which aimed to explore the effect of freewriting on development of learners’ correct use of punctuation marks in their paragraph writings. The participants were 36 female intermediate students with Persian as their first language, enrolled in a six-week intensive English writing class. To homogenize the respondents they were given a version of Oxford Quick Placement Test (OPT) in order to assess the participants’ proficiency level. As a pretest and posttest students were supposed to write about a topic which were scored according to a standard rubric. In order to test the inter-rater reliability of the scores given by the two raters, intra-class correlation coefficient was calculated. Mann Whitney test was used to compare the experimental and control group's OPT scores and Wilcoxon test was used to compare the pretest and posttest scores of each group separately and the results showed that the treatment affected the learners in experimental group significantly.
ISSN:1799-2591
2053-0692
DOI:10.17507/tpls.0801.05