The effect of awareness-raising training in css on students' writing performance

Abstract EN

This study examined the effect of communication strategy (CS) training on subjects' writing performance during a period of seven-week extensive English course, as part of the Interchange Series, at the Language & Translation Center.

The study targeted 89 intermediate Egyptian English foreign language (EFL) learners.

The experimental group (n = 51) received the regular English course plus an extra eight-hour training on the use of two communication strategies (CSs), namely approximation and circumlocution.

On the other hand, the control group (n = 38) received only the regular English course.

The effects of the training were assessed by a pretest and a posttest to measure subjects writing performance in four different tasks.

During the treatment, the experimental group was trained to use CSs, namely approximation and circumlocution to describe, explain or define pictures, objects and define nouns whether they possess the correct lexical name of the target items or not.

The objective of the training of such strategies is to give the participants tools to use when their lexical repertoire is insufficient to reserve the communicative goal.

The findings showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the pretest in both groups writing performance.

On the contrary, in the posttest, the experimental group outperformed the control group.

The training program affected the experimental group in becoming aware of when and how to use CSs, to be more risk takers and use these strategies as a remedy to their limited linguistic resources to overcome their lexical difficulties during writing tasks.