Exploring The Interaction During EFL Students’ Prewriting Discussions And Its Relationship To English Writing Quality

A variety of studies have testified the effectiveness of prewriting discussions on the writing quality.However,they don’t elaborate on how the prewriting discussions affect the content and organization of writing.Seeing this research gap,the author chose 30 English major sophomore students of similar language levels from Huazhong University of Science and Technology to investigate how their interaction during the prewriting discussions impact their English writing quality in terms of content and organization.These students come from two classes.The author randomly chose one of them to be the experiment class and the other the control class.While the control class only needs to finish the writing task,the experiment class needs to undergo the prewriting discussion phase and fill in the open-ended questionnaires after the writing.This research combines the quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis to examine the data.By calculating the content score,organization score and the overall score of the written texts of each student,the research finds that all three mean scores of the experiment class are higher than those of the control class.And the results of the Independent Samples T Test reveal a significant difference(p< 0.05)in the mean overall score between the two classes,but there is no significant statistical difference in the mean content score and organization score.And through a qualitative analysis of the prewriting discussions and the written texts of the experiment class,the research finds that students mainly talk about the content and organization of their intended essays and reflections and cooperation in prewriting discussions help improve students’ writing quality.And the results of the open-ended questionnaires show that the attitudes of the participants are positive towards the prewriting discussions for the overwhelming majority.Some deficiencies like small size of the subjects can be found in this thesis.It’s expected that future researches will make improvements based on this study and provide more new findings.