Writing Fluency Activity Analysis

The Writing Fluency Activity

During the spring, 2014 academic semester at Asia University students from three Freshman English classes were asked to participate in weekly writing activities held in a computer lab on campus. The Freshman English course is a required, year-long four skills English course with an emphasis on speaking and listening in order for students to improve their oral communication skills in English. Secondary to the speaking and listening aims of the course are reading and writing, which are practiced using various methodologies according to the instructor of the course. As mentioned earlier, practicing writing in the Freshman English class is seen by students as more challenging and less enjoyable than practicing speaking

To make the writing fluency activity meet this criteria, I made it very clear to the students what my expectations for them were and exactly what they need to do to meet these expectations. On the first day in the computer lab I explained to students the difference between accuracy and fluency. As with speaking fluency, writing fluency emphasizes quantity over quality. I told students they should try to write as much as possible in a fixed period of time and not to stop writing until the time is up. Students were also informed not to edit their writing, and not to worry about spelling mistakes or punctuation. The topics of the writing activities for this semester I chose followed some basic criteria: (1) They would be personal, (2) They would be broad topics that students could have the freedom to explore in different ways, and (3) They would be appropriate to the level of English ability of the average student in the class. With these requirements in mind I decided that all of the writing topics would be presented to the students in the form of a “My…” style prompt, for example, My family…, My favorite food…, My dream vacation… (See Appendix A). By allowing and encouraging students to focus on the quantity of their writing over the

With three classes of about twenty-four students, a fifteen minute activity each week should not take up the majority of the instructor’s preparation time outside of the classroom. As most teachers can attest to, writing assignments require a large amount of time to read and grade. Even though the goal of the writing fluency activity was on quantity (the number of English words written) as opposed to quality (how well correct grammar and sentence structure was used), collecting data can be a time consuming process. Like in other quantitative research studies, the researcher must count the items being measured, be they words or pauses in speech. In writing fluency studies where students write by hand, the process of counting the number of words written by each student would likely take a very long time. With this reality in mind, my goal of changing students’ negative perception of writing in English needed to be adapted to the realities of the teaching environment I was in. By using computers I was able to save untold hours in administering the weekly activities, monitoring student writing in real time, collecting and analyzing data, and finally providing feedback to the students to help them in future writing