Effects of Idea-Generation Strategies on Vietnamese Efl Students’ Expository Writing Quality and Self-Efficacy

This quasi-experimental study was conducted to investigate the effects of idea-generation strategies, group discussion, and freewriting on Vietnamese EFL students’ expository writing quality. Changes in these students’ writing self-efficacy after they used the two strategies were also explored. Forty-seven EFL sophomore students of Tra Vinh University were chosen to be the participants of this study. The students were divided into two groups: experimental group 1 and experimental group 2. In the pre-writing stage, while students in experimental group 1 shared their ideas in a group discussion, students in experimental group 2 generated their ideas through freewriting. Data were collected through two writing tests including a pretest and a post-test, and a self-efficacy questionnaire delivered before and after the six-week intervention. Analysis of the test results exhibited that both group discussion and freewriting enhanced the quality of students’ texts in terms of content and organization, with group discussion resulting in better content than freewriting. Specifically, both strategies helped students’ writing self-efficacy with respect to writing ideation, writing conventions, and writing self-regulation change positively. Finally, some recommendations for future researchers are also mentioned. Article visualizations: