Text-based teaching and writing skills development

Abstract

The current study aimed to identify the effectiveness of Text-based teaching in writing skills development in second semester students of Pedagogía de los idiomas nacionales y extranjeros at Universidad Técnica de Ambato. The methodology used in this study was pre-experimental with a quantitative approach. A total of 40 university students (33 females and 7 males ranging in age from 19 to 23 years old) participated in this research, who were assessed through a pre and post-test using a Cambridge B1 preliminary test, writing section, to collect information about their writing skills in relation to 4 criteria (content, communicative achievement, language, and organization). The duration of the treatment was 4 weeks, with a series of 8 interventions through Textbased teaching, in which a variety of physical and technological resources were used, always based on a reading text as the basis for each lesson. An automated writing evaluation tool (Perplexity) was used to support the review and provision of feedback on the written outcomes of each lesson. The collected data were analyzed using IBM SPSS, Shapiro Wilk Statistic, and T-test to verify the hypothesis. The data for the pre-test and post-test were obtained based on the 4 Cambridge criteria of writing. In this study was found that Text-based teaching had a significant impact on the development of writing skills, specifically on 2 assessed criteria: communicative achievement (how appropriate the writing is for the task) and organization (the way students put the writing together, whether it is logical and orderly), as demonstrated by a comparison of the mean scores between the pre-test and post-test