The Effect of Freewriting on Developing Punctuation Marks in Paragraph Writings of Iranian EFL Intermediate Learners

Abstract

Abstract-Freewriting is writing whatever one knows or thinks for a certain length of time without stopping and editing till the time finishes. It's an easy and useful way of writing for generating ideas but it is sometimes full of errors. The current study examined a new area of freewriting which aimed to explore the effect of freewriting on development of learners' correct use of punctuation marks in their paragraph writings. The participants were 36 female intermediate students with Persian as their first language, enrolled in a six-week intensive English writing class. To homogenize the respondents they were given a version of Oxford Quick Placement Test (OPT) in order to assess the participants' proficiency level. As a pretest and posttest students were supposed to write about a topic which were scored according to a standard rubric. In order to test the inter-rater reliability of the scores given by the two raters, intra-class correlation coefficient was calculated. Mann Whitney test was used to compare the experimental and control group's OPT scores and Wilcoxon test was used to compare the pretest and posttest scores of each group separately and the results showed that the treatment affected the learners in experimental group significantly.

The First Freshmen Students’ University Test of English Proficiency: A Descriptive and Correlational Study

“…The finest test should have two characteristics: validity and reliability (Chan et al, 2015;Divayana et al, 2021;Hoffmann, 1964;Nouri & Marzban, 2018). To be effective, the test must measure the level it intends to measure.…”