Comparison of the Impacts of Writing To Learn and Writing To Communicate Activities on Academic Achievement in TESL Classrooms

Abstract

The main question of the study is “What are the impacts of Writing To Learn (WTL) and Writing To Communicate (WTC) activities on the academic success of the English learning students?”. This study aims to compare the effects of WTL and WTC activities on academic success of students in English lessons. The study was carried out with 59 (27 male, 32 female) ninth grade high school students in 2015-2016 in Turkey. One of the quantitative designs, quasi-experimental design with nonequivalent control group was used in the study. Experimental group had 30 students (16 female, 14 male) and control group had 29 students (16 female, 13 male). Present Perfect Tense Academic Achievement Test (PPTAAT) and Rubrics developed by the researcher were used as data collection tools in the study. Students in the experiment group wrote “WTL letters” and the control group students wrote “WTC letters” for four weeks as in class and homework assignments. There are four hypotheses of the research and analyses were made to prove the correctness of them. All of the hypotheses were corrected based on the results. As a result of the study, it was detected that there is a statistically meaningful difference for the benefit of the experimental group. It can be said that writing WTL letter helps students learn English better than writing WTC letter. Teachers can be recommended to change the way they use writing from WTC to WTL.