OVERCOMING PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS TO WRITE: A COGNITIVE COACHING APPROACH TO PLANNING WRITING

Abstract

The current research examines a common issue faced by high school students in Morocco, specifically in the area of sentence construction. The study uses action research embracing a cognitive coaching approach to identify and address the problem. The researcher hypothesizes that students' writing difficulties extend beyond the sentence level to the paragraph level. To address this issue, the researcher implements several activities which aim to raise students' awareness of sentence structure and help them construct meaningful and grammatically correct sentences. The results indicate that the activities were successful in improving students' writing skills, particularly in sentence construction. Moreover, the cognitive coaching approach which is applied to overcome the psychological barriers that hinder writing skills has yielded to positive results. Overall, the research suggests that these activities along with the approach used can be effective in improving students' writing skills and should be incorporated into language instruction.