Effects of Planning and Revising Conditions on EFL Learners’ Writing Quality

Abstract

The current study aimed at investigating the effects of the four different writing conditions (with-planning/without-planning conditions and initial-draft-accessible/ initial-draft-removed conditions) on EFL learners’ writing quality. For the study 95 college freshmen were randomly assigned into four condition groups. They were asked to write an argumentative essay about the effects of Internet use, and then to revise the initial draft under the four different conditions. They were also required to respond the pre- and post-survey to find more information about them and what they thought about the experimental conditions. The findings of the study are as follows: 1) the with-planning condition turned out to be a better strategy than the without-planning (or free writing) one when the participants were engaged in the revision process, although the two strategies failed to play a different role in initial writing quality; that is planning holds out a fair chance of successful organization of the writing text, facilitative content retrieval, and lowered cognitive load for writing; and 2) those engaged in the initial-writing-accessible condition outperformed those in the initial-writing-removed condition, which suggests that the learners with their initial drafts in the revision process may write better quality of the revised drafts. Discussion and pedagogical implication were addressed.