CALL, Prewriting Strategies, and EFL Writing Quantity

This study sought to explore the effect of teaching prewriting strategies through different methods of input delivery (i.e. conventional, web-based, and hybrid) on EFL learners’ writing quantity. In its quasi-experimental study, the researchersrecruited 98 available sophomores, and assigned them to three experimental groups (conventional, web-based, and hybrid groups) and a control group. The control group received product-oriented writing instruction regarding paragraph writing, whereas the experimental groups were taught, though under different learning conditions, to use prewriting strategies pertinent to generating ideas through freewriting, brainstorming, listing, clustering, and asking wh-questions during the planning stage of writing. The learners’ writing quantity was measured, both prior to and after the implementation of the experiment, via counting the number of idea units in the writing tasks which were administered to the learners as the pretest and posttest. One-Way between-groups ANOVA was utilized to analyze and compare the collected dataand to discern whether and to what extent the participants in each group could gain benefit from their specific type of instruction. The results of this study revealed that writing quantity was indeed under the influence of different treatments, with the learners in the hybrid group outperforming their counterparts in all the other groups.