Reading for writing.

Abstract

The study investigates the effects of an extensive short story reading program on the EFL writing skills development of intermediate-level university students in Ankara, Turkey. Two groups displaying similar performance on the writing proficiency pre-test were formed, an experimental group and a control group The experimental group was exposed to a three-month extensive short story reading program, and at the end of the program, both groups were administered a writing proficiency post-test. For statistical analysis, ANOVA procedures were applied to the test scores of both groups. The study revealed that the EFL learners in the experimental group exposed to the extensive short story reading program attained a higher level of writing proficiency post-test scores. The findings of this study indicate that although the extensive short story reading program played a facilitative role in EFL writing proficiency, longer extensive reading programs seem to be necessary to obtain statistically significant improvement in the writing skills of the students.

Introduction

Many studies have been carried out on the acquisition of writing skills, and the development of writing competence, over the past two decades. They attempt to understand how L2 writing is done and how to promote L2 writing proficiency. These studies inspired theoretical models of writing, as well as the theoretical analyses of the process, product and place (settings, functions & background) of writing have had implications on classroom procedures. Since writing is a complex process, one that requires proficiency in several areas of skill and knowledge, research into writing has developed in psychology, cognitive sciences, linguistics and first and second language education.

Recent models of process of writing in a second language have been either comparisons with first language models or extensions of them (Kroll, 1990; Silva, 1993; Zimmerman, 2000). The writing product has also been the subject of quite a number of studies (Conner, 1994; De Beaugrande, 1990). Many recent analyses of textual structure have focused on internal regularities and structuring in texts and on factors influencing textuality (Connor & Johns, 1990; DeBeaugrande & Dressier, 1981; Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Moreover, analysis of the structure of texts by second language learners have mainly focused on developmental issues like the appearance of newly learned items (Hecht & Green, 1993; Wessberg, 2000), or on changes in discourse structure (Archibald, 1994). The context of writing, the interactivity between a text and its contents of production, has been emphasized in poststructuralist and postmodernist analyses. Issues of ideology (Bennsch, 1993), politics, power (Fairclough, 1989), identity (Ivanich, 1998), have also been important topics in writing research.

A considerable amount of research on process, product and place has stemmed from analysis of second language classroom situations, analyses of the learning process, strategies of second language writers, as well as the role of learning and instruction and their implications on L2 writing. Studies by Cumming (1989, 1995), Raimes (1985, 1987), and Silva (1993) highlighted the distinctive and peculiar features of L2 writing and called for models of L2 writing and the development of classroom processes that accounts for this. Raimes (1991) focuses on emerging traditions in approaches to writing and discusses the recent consequences of some of the issues of product, process and place for the classroom.

Wolff (2000) argues that, from a psycholinguistic perspective, L2 writing skills are different, but at the same time also dependent on, L1 writing skills. From an instructional angle, the specific writing skills a L2 learner unconsciously develops should be taught in order to promote L2 writing competence. Wolff also argues that L2 writing competence is related to L2 reading competence, and especially to the frequency with which the L2 learner makes use of his/her reading competence, which are both psycholinguistic and instructional issues. Wolff states that the importance of L2 reading for L2 writing has not really been touched upon in L2 writing research and pedagogy, although Krashen (1984) has underlined the importance of L2 reading for L2 writing acquisition.

Krashen, who makes a distinction between the two learning modes of acquisition and learning, argues that foreign languages are acquired similarly to the way children acquire their first language: "Language acquisition is a subconscious process: language acquirers are not usually aware of the fact that they are acquiring language but are only aware that they are using the language for communication." (1982:10).

On the other hand, according to Krashen, language learning is a conscious process. It is "conscious knowledge of a second language, knowing the rules, being aware of them and being able to talk about them" (1988:10). Explicit learning, states Krashen, results in the conscious representation of linguistic generalizations, a "meta-awareness" of language. However learning the grammar rules of a second language according to Krashen does not necessarly result in subconscious acquisition. Krashen also argues that the goal of traditional language teaching is formal competence, however, he considers acquisition to be the dominant means of developing proficiency in L2. Krashen states that for acquisition to occur, second language learners need to be exposed to an adequate amount of comprehensible input that is meaningful, interesting or relevant and which is provided in a tension free learning environment. Krashen argues that if teachers want to see real L2 improvement in their students' writing skills, they must become advocates of free reading and must encourage their students to read extensively (Krashen, 1989).

However, in language classes, as Hyland claims, "texts are either milked of every last drop of meaning by intensive study or employed as vehicles for presenting linguistic patterns" (1990:14). Pino-Silva (1992) advises teachers to explain to their students the merits and importance of reading for pleasure in a foreign language, since it not only improves the readers' vocabulary and understanding of the structure of the language, but it also gives them a feeling of satisfaction to be able to read a text in a foreign language. Nuttal, who also supports extensive reading, argues that students who read a lot will not become fluent overnight, but that the improvement in their productive skills often comes as a breakthrough that results in their progressing at increasing speed and far outstripping their classmates who have not developed the reading habit (1982:24).

Several empirical studies on the beneficial effects of extensive reading on learners' command (e.g. Greaney & Hegarty, 1987; Hafiz & Tudor, 1989; Paribakht & Wesche, 1993; Pino-Silva, 1992; Shanan, 1987; Stotsky, 1983) reveal that extensive reading is more effective in enlarging vocabulary and attaining vocabulary maturity and complexity than is formal instruction. Empirical studies and surveys on the relationship between extensive reading and the development of writing skills also reveal that extensive reading contributes to the development of writing skills (e.g. Elley, 1991; Krashen & Chang, 1997; Woodfard & Phillips, 1967).

In fact, there is a reciprocal relationship between language and literature. Since literature is language and language is the raw material of literature, as Moody (1971) asserts, literature is fundamentally an expression of life through medium of language. Mc Kay (1991) believes that it is beneficial for EFL learners to read literature because literature affects language and thus culture in a positive way. Literature influences personal development in which the intellect, the senses, and the feelings undergo excellent training. Literature also helps to develop students' language skills. The use of literature in the classroom is effective in the development of linguistic knowledge on the levels of both usage and use. Widdowson (1985) also states that foreign language learning is a very complex process. To reduce this complexity, applied linguists and methodologists seek different methods, and many textbooks that are full of repeated events and can therefore be interpreted as weak copies of fiction. He suggests that using literary texts would bring enjoyment to language classes enabling students to be exposed to real language and the way of life of a population. According to Subramarian:

   The study of literature, besides being the study of plot, theme,
   characters, style and setting, is also a study of language use.
   Since it is the study of how writers use language to express
   their ideas and thoughts, the study of literature cannot be seen
   as an activity separate from language learning. Instead it has to
   be viewed as an aspect of the same activity (1990:22).

Of all the genres of literature, as Taylor points out: "Short stories on account of their structure and comparative brevity often provide a more fruitful basis for language study and discussion than any other form of fiction (1989:1). And according to Collie and Slater (1987), short stories, like most other literary genres, contain the widest variety of syntax and the richest variations of vocabulary discrimination. Thus by reading short stories, students gain familiarity with many features of the written language, including the formation and function of sentences, the variety of possible structures, and different ways of connecting ideas. These features, in turn, broaden and enrich students' own writing skills. They become more creative in their productive skills, begin to appreciate the richness and variety of language they are trying to master, and begin to use some of that potential themselves.

The aim of the present research was to investigate the effects of a three-month extensive short story reading program on the development of the EFL writing skills on intermediate level university students in Ankara, Turkey. In this study, it was hypothesized that the writing proficiency level of the students who were exposed to the extensive short story reading program would be higher than those of students not enrolled in such a program. In other words, the students in the experimental group should obtain higher scores than the students in the control group on the writing post-test administered after the implementation of the extensive reading program. To obtain evidence pertinent to the hypothesis prior to the implementation of the extensive short story reading program, a pre-test was designed and administered to two experimental groups and two control groups, and then the extensive short story reading program was carried out for the experimental group.

For the extensive short story reading program, fifty stories from canonical authors were chosen. The stories were used in their original form to provide rich, authentic, comprehensible input and function as a stimulus for real communication. The selected stories had a maximum length of 8 pages. After the selection of the stories for the extensive reading program, several copies of each story were made to enable different students to read the same story during the same week. The students read two short stories per week for three months. One important aspect of the program was that stories were chosen by the students according to their preference. The advantage of this was, after reading certain stories, students had the opportunity to recommend them to their classmates. As the term "extensive reading" implies, traditional reading tasks employed within the EFL classroom were outside the scope of this program. Since the students read these short stories for pleasure, they were not assigned any task or homework on these stories. That is to say, the short story reading was completely a free task activity. However for each story read, students were given a "short story report sheet" to fill in so that the teacher could check whether they had actually read the story or not. By the end of the extensive reading program, each student in the experimental group had read 24 short stories. Both the control and experimental groups followed the regular intensive English program at the Department of Basic English with a syllabus that treated all four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) equally. Both the groups had five hours of class every day.

Method

Participants

In this study data was collected from 64 intermediate level students from four different classes at the Department of Basic English, Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Students in this department go through an extensive English program for one academic year before entering departments where medium of instruction is English. In order to avoid the instructors' bias in regard to the probable difference between the control group and the experimental group, or writing proficiency pre-test and post-test results, the study groups were chosen randomly among classes whose teachers' mean averages were similar according to the results of the Teacher's Evaluation Form of the previous term. Two of these four selected classes, whose population was 16 each, formed the experimental group and the other two classes, also composed of 16 students each, made up the control group. The age range of the subjects was 17-19 and the mean age was 17.5.

Tests and procedures

The students involved in the study were administered a writing proficiency pre-test prior to the implementation of the extensive reading program so that their proficiency level in EFL writing could be determined. The students in both groups were asked to write an essay of approximately 300 words in which they were to explain their opinions of "euthanasia". The duration of the test was 50 minutes. The students in both the experimental and the control groups practiced writing essays on different topics during the previous term and had a basic knowledge of how to write an English essay. The students' essays were evaluated in terms of organization, linguistic accuracy and mechanics.

For the writing proficiency pre-test and post-test results, inter-scorer reliability correlation was utilized. For the pre-test results, the inter-scorer reliability was found to be r = .90. As for the post-test results, r = .89 was the correlation level between the two scorers. With a view to measuring the change in the level of achievement in EFL writing skills in the experimental group after the extensive short story reading program, the same writing test was administered both to the experimental and control groups, each of which was composed of two different classes and 32 students. The descriptive statistics concerning the pre and post-test results are displayed in Table 1. See issue's website <http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/spr2003.htm>

Table 1 presents a descriptive analysis of the writing proficiency pre and post-test results of the subjects. The mean scores of all the classes in the experimental and control groups indicated that they were at the intermediate level of English, just as it was assumed prior to the conduct of the pre-test. The level of significance adopted for the study was .05, and the level of significance obtained through ANOVA of the pretest scores was below .05. This indicated that there was no significant difference within and between the experimental and the control groups in terms of their proficiency levels in writing before the implementation of the extensive short story reading program.

Aiming to measuring the change in the level of achievement in EFL writing skills in the experimental group after the extensive reading program, the same writing test was administered both to the experimental and control group. The mean scores of experimental group class 1 and class 2, which were respectively 53.28 and 53.12 in the writing pre-test, increased to 71.71 and 70.31 in the post-test and the average mean was 71.01. However, the mean scores of control group 1 and 2, which were respectively 53.28 and 55.00 in the pre-test, increased to 64.06 and 64.68 in the post-test. The average mean of these two classes was 64.37. There was a 6.64-point difference between the mean scores of the experimental and the control groups. It can be assumed that the extensive short story reading program was effective in improving the EFL writing skills proficiency of the experimental classes.

The results of ANOVA applied to the writing proficiency pre-test and post-test scores of the subjects involved in the study revealed no significant difference between the writing proficiency pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups at the .05 significance level. However it should be noted that the obtained difference (p = .062) is very close to the significance level aimed at by the study.

Results and discussion

This study aimed at finding out whether an extensive short story reading program would be facilitative in EFL writing skills development. One experimental and one control group were formed, each of which was composed of two different intermediate level classes. The number of subjects involved totaled 64 (32 in each group). Prior to the implementation of the program, a writing proficiency pre-test was administered to all classes involved in the study and no significant difference was found between and within the experimental and control groups concerning the pre-test scores. The experimental groups were exposed to an extensive reading program for three months. Each subject in the experimental group read 24 short stories during this period at the rate of 2 short stories per week. During the implementation of the program, the only task that the experimental groups had was to fill in a short story report sheet for each story so that the teacher could check whether the subjects had actually read the stories or not. At the end of three months, a writing proficiency post-test, which was exactly the same as the writing proficiency pre-test, was given to the experimental and control groups to measure the effectiveness of the short story reading program on the development of EFL writing skills in the experimental groups.

Although the result of ANOVA applied to the writing proficiency post-test scores of the subjects in the study was not statistically significant, the extensive short story reading program applied to the experimental group seemed to be effective in improving the EFL writing skills proficiency levels of the subjects exposed to this program in so far as their writing proficiency post-test mean scores were concerned. Compared to the control groups' average mean score (64.37) on the writing proficiency post-test, the average mean score of the experimental groups (71.01) were 6.64-points higher. This difference can be assumed to be the result of the extensive short story reading program, because, all the subjects involved in the study were exposed to the same curriculum throughout the semester in terms of writing, reading and listening skills and grammar, both content wise and time wise. Therefore, the difference between the mean scores of the experimental group and the control group appears to indicate that the extensive short story reading program was quite effective in improving the EFL writing proficiency levels in the experimental groups. However the results seem to indicate obtaining a more significant improvement in EFL writing skills, which is a production skill, requires more than three months. A curriculum that contains a carefully developed instructional content that leads to reading and the exposure of students to selected literary texts to which students can respond immediately without the mediation of the teacher can guide them to reading for pleasure, which would help them to move on from skill acquisition to language control. Since literature creates its own context, it overcomes the artificial classroom situation as a means of access to the foreign culture, and since what people produce is related to the totality of their experience, literature also provides an experiential basis for learning how to express similar semantic intentions through the production system of writing. The researchers hope that the 6.64-point difference between the control groups and experimental groups will not only be an indication of a general improvement in the students' writing, but also an indication of the acquisition of reading habits of literature which they will be able to perfect long after they have ceased to be students of English.

References

Archibald, A. (1994). The acquisition of discourse proficiency: A study of the ability of the German school students to produce written texts in English as a foreign language. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Benesch, S. (1993). ESL ideology and the politics of pragmatism. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 4, 705-716.

Collie, J. & Slater, S. (1987). Literature in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: CUP.

Conner, U. (1994). Alternatives in TESOL research: Text analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 28: (4), 682-684.

Conner, U. & Johns, A. M. (1990). Coherence in writing. Alexandria. Virginia: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages Inc.

Cumming, A. (1989). Writing expertise and second language proficiency. Language Learning, 39, 1, 82-141.

Cumming, A. (1995). Fostering writing expertise in ESL composition instruction modelling and evaluation. In D. Belcher & G. Braine, (Eds.) Academic writing in a second language: Essays on Research and Pedagogy, (375-397) Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

De Beaugrande, R. & Dressier, W. (1981). Introduction to text linguistics. London: Longman.

De Beaugrande, R. (1990). Text linguistics through the years. Text, 10, 293-310.

Elley, W. B. (1991). Acquiring literacy in a second language: The effect of book based programs. Language Learning, 4, 3, 375-411.

Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman.

Greaney, V. & Hegarty, M. (1987). Correlations of leisure time reading. Journal of Research in Reading, 10, 3-20.

Haftz, F. M. & Tudor, I. (1989). Extensive reading and the development of language skills. ELT Journal, 43, 1, 4-13.

Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Hyland, K. (1990). Purpose and strategy: Teaching extensive reading skills. English Teaching Forum, 28, 2, 14-17.

Hecht, K. & Green, P. S. (1993). English teaching in the gymnasium: How does knowledge and ability develop? An empirical study into the development of learner language. Die Neueren Sprachen. 1-93.

Ivanic, R. (1998). Writing and Identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.

Krashen, S. D. (1984). Reading. Oxford: O.U.P.

Krashen, S. D. (1989). We acquire vocabulary and spelling by reading: Additional evidence for the input hypothesis. The Modern Language Journal, 73,440-464.

Krashen, S. D. (1993). The case for voluntary reading. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 30, 1, 72-82.

Krashen, S.D. & Chang, S. J. (1997). The effect of free reading on language and academic development: A natural experiment. Mosaic, 4, 13-15.

Kroll, B. (1990). Second language writing: Research insights for the classroom. Cambridge: C.U.P.

McKay, S. (1991). Literature in the English classroom. In C. J. Brumfit and R.A. Carter (Eds.) Literature and Language Teaching, Hong Kong: OUP.

Moody, H. L. B. (1971). The Teaching of Literature. Hong Kong: Longman.

Nuttall, C. (1982). Teaching Foreign Skills in a Foreign Language. Oxford: Heinemann International.

Paribakht, T. S. & Wesche, M. B. (1993). Reading comprehension and second language development in a comprehension based ESL program. TESL Canada Journal, 11, 1, 9-29.

Pino-Silva, J. (1992). Extensive reading: No pain, no gain? English Teaching Forum, 30, 2, 48-49.

Raimes, A. (1985) What unskilled ESL students do as they write. A Classroom study of composing. TESOL Quarterly, 19, 2, 229-258.

Raimes, A. (1987). Language proficiency, writing ability, and composing strategies: A study of ESL college student writers. Language Learning, 37, 3, 439-468.

Raimes, A. (1991). Out of the woods: Emerging traditions in the teaching of writing. TESOL Quarterly, 25, 3.407-430.

Shanahan, T. (1987). The shared knowledge of reading and writing. Reading Psychology, 8, 93-102.

Silva, T. (1993). Toward an understanding of the distinct nature of L2 writing: The ESL research and its implications. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 657-677.

Stotsky, S. (1983). Research on reading / writing relationships: A synthesis and suggested directions. Language Arts, 60, 627-642.

Subramanian, N. (1990). The short story in the language classroom. Guidelines, 12, 2, 22-29.

Taylor, P. J. V. (1989). More Modern Short Stories. Hong Kong: OUP.

Weissberg, B. (2000). Developmental relationships in the acquisition of English syntax: Writing vs. speech. Learning and Instruction, 34, 1, 37-55.

Widdowson, H. G. (1985). The teaching, learning and study of literature. In R. Quirk and H.G. Widdowson (Eds.) English in the world: Teaching and Learning the language and Literatures. Cambridge: CUP.

Wolff, D. (2000). Second language writing: A few remarks on psycholinguistic and instructional issues. Learning and Instruction, 34, 1,107-112.

Woodfard, J. & Phillips, A. (1967). Profile of the poor writer. Research in the Teaching of English, 1, 41-53.

Zimmermann, R. (2000). L2 writing subproccesses: A model of formulating and empirical findings. Learning and Instruction. 10, 73-101

Meral Cileli, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Gonca Ozen, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

Meral is an Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Language Education. Her research area includes Literature in English language teaching and literature and psychology. Gonca is an Instructor, School of Foreign Languages, Department of Basic English. Her research area includes teaching English as a foreign language.