On the Effectiveness of Two Pre-writing Strategies on EFL Learners Writing Performance and Willingness to Communicate

Writing as one of important skills among language learning skills has different skills that pre-writing is one of them. Pre-writing is defined as a “getting ready to write” stage (Cohen Cowen, 2010). The present study aimed at investigating the effect of listen to write and brainstorm to write as two pre-writing activities on EFL learners writing performance. It also investigated the possible effect of the two pre-writing activities on EFL learners willingness to communicate. To this end, 90 Iranian EFL intermediate learners were selected and took part in a quasi-experimental study and their performance on a pretest and posttest design were taken into account. The results of the ANOVA revealed that the instruction of brainstorm strategy had a positive effect on EFL learners’ writing performance in comparison with ‘listen to write’ group and no pre-writing group or control group. The results also indicated that there is no significant difference in in the willingness to communicate of students who are exposed to ‘brainstorm to write’ and ‘listen to write’ as two different pre-writing activities. Based on the conclusions, pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research were suggested.