EFL Learners' Rewriting Strategy in English Composition

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of rewriting on student compositions that were created without referencing either the first draft or teacher feedback. A total of thirty students in a university-level English composition class served as the participants in this study. The data were collected from persuasive essays produced in-class. For analysis, two evaluators graded two sets of drafts according to a scoring rubric focusing on format, content, organization, and grammar. In addition, further error analysis was conducted based on syntactic and semantic error at both word level and sentence level. As a result, significant improvement was observed in the second drafts throughout the four areas. Also, the results of the error analysis showed that syntactic errors were reduced significantly at both word level and sentence level. On the other hand, word-level semantic errors were not reduced considerably, and sentence-level semantic errors showed only a marginal decline. The results indicate that students could improve their second draft and reduce syntactic error through their own discernment. However, they may need assistance from instructors to correct certain semantic errors, specifically errors related to word choice.