Effects of Process-oriented Instruction on Korean EFL Students’ Writing at Different Levels of Proficiency

A process-oriented approach to writing has been advocated in EFL contexts in recent years. The present study examined how effective process-oriented instruction is on writing of EFL students at different levels of proficiency. For doing this, eighty-four essays written by twenty-eight Korean university students over the course of a semester (15 weeks) were examined. The study was designed as a quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest design. It was found that students at all levels of proficiency showed a statistically significant increase in average word length over time. The intermediate and advanced students demonstrated significant improvement in overall essay scores. The intermediate students manifested the greatest benefit with the increase of word and sentence length and the overall quality of writing, while the advanced students were the greatest beneficiaries of process-oriented instruction in terms of the overall score. For the beginning level students, the reduction of grammar errors was prominent. In summary, processoriented instruction aided all level students but in different respects. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications.