INTERVENTIONS FOR STUDENT AUTONOMY IN A VIRTUAL EFL WRITING CLASSROOM

Abstract

The study investigates whether the design of a combined intervention with selfanalysis of re-contextualized sample texts and subsequent peer interactions might be promising in supporting writing skills development ofVietnamese EFL students in a virtual environment. A pretest-posttest control group design with switching replications was set up with one experimental condition of the combined intervention and one conventional condition with teacherled analysis of textbook-based samples. Participants included 97 Vietnamese English-majored undergraduate students in the third year in a university in Mekong Delta, Vietnam: 46 studentsin the experimental condition and 51 students in the control condition. Univariate covariance analyses showed that experimental condition had a positive effect on quality of texts. For writing fluency, students of the experimental condition wrote longer texts in the second panel (posttest 2); the effect could not be seen immediately in the first panel (posttest 1). Implications for EFL writing pedagogy and research, includingresearch planning to avoid the effect of topic on quality of writing, importance of writing topics relevant to L2 student writers, and organization of prewriting sessions are discussed in the last part of the paper.