The Effect of Strategies-Based Instruction on the Improvement of EFL Learners’ Writing Quality

The present study draws primarily on Vygotsky’s (1978)sociocultural approach and sets out to explore the effect of instruction ofsociocultural writing strategies on the improvement of EFL learners’ quality of writing.The study was conducted with two EFL writing classes randomly assigned to anexperimental (N = 22) and a control group (N = 21) during a university term. Althoughthe students in both classes worked in groups while practicing writing, only theexperimental group was continuously taught to mediate their writings through differentstrategies and contextual mediations based on Engstrom’s (1987) activity theory. Thestudents’ individual writing scores at the beginning and at the end of the experimentwere compared, and the results convincingly proved that the experimental group madesignificantly more improvement in their writing ability than did the control group. Theanalysis of the recorded students’ interactions in both groups revealed that theexperimental group used almost all the sociocultural strategies while practicingwriting, whereas the control group made a very limited use of only some of thesestrategies