A Mixed-methods Study of the Effects of MALL-Mediated Writing Strategy Awareness-raising on Writing Performance and Anxiety of IELTS Candidates

Abstract

This study examines the effect of strategy awareness-raising on the writing complexity, accuracy, and anxiety of IELTS candidates using a social networking medium (i.e., Telegram). To achieve this goal, 72 upper-intermediate English learners performed five writing tasks (the first and the last one of which were analyzed based on T-units) and completed an anxiety questionnaire developed by Cheng (2004). In addition, the participants were divided into the two groups experimental and control where the experimental group joined discussion groups on Telegram and the teacher-researcher shared the strategies used by the participants for further discussion. The results showed that writing strategy awareness-raising had a significant positive effect on both writing complexity and accuracy, but a negative effect on writing anxiety. Think-aloud protocols were coded based on five broad categories of planning, monitoring/evaluating, revising, retrieving, and compensating introduced by He et al. (2011). The results of the analysis indicated that the frequency of writing strategies used by the participants increased significantly except for retrieving strategies. The strategies contributing to the success of writing tasks are presented and discussed in the paper.