The Impact of Product and Process Approach on Iranian EFL Learners’ Writing Ability and Their Attitudes toward Writing Skill

The purpose of the current study was twofold; its first aim was to determine the effect of using of two approaches namely; product and process on developing the fluency, accuracy, and using discourse markers (DMs) of EFL learners’ writing performance. Secondly, it attempted to investigate the effect of mentioned approaches on EFL learners’ attitude toward writing skill. The participants in this study were 60 Iranian learners who were divided into three groups; control and two experimental groups. The control group received no treatment and only received explicit recast feedback toward their writing performance. However, every experimental group received treatment through differential approaches. The findings of the study based on one-way ANOVA revealed that process approach significantly affected on EFL learners’ writing performance. Additionally, the results manifested the positive effect of process approach on EFL learners’ attitude toward writing skill. The current study suggested that in order to develop the EFL learners’ writing skill, the EFL instructors can insert the process based approach in syllabus design.


Introduction
Writing can be considered as a basic communication skill in the current communication world.It is an activity that captures the mental effort to think out the sentences and join them in a meaningful and communicative way (Al-Haq et al., 2010).Writing in the language becomes more complicated when it involves writing meaningful segments of language (Rivers, 1981).Teaching English writing has been a tough job for many non-native English teachers (Gen, 2005).In learning process focusing only on learners' errors develop neither accuracy nor fluency and also seem to have little effect on their using DMs.Therefore, at this study it was attempted to benefit of the productive approaches in learning processes instead of recast feedback and it was hoped, through learners' involvement in writing process, to amend the learners' attitude toward writing skill.

Review of the Related Literature
Writing can be regarded as a main skill in EFL, since it needs thinking.It is considered not only as a means of communication, but as a process of construction of knowledge.As a skill, learning how to write apparently needs to be taught.Rusinovci (2015) stated that there are several approaches to teaching writing used by teachers and educators since many years to remember.Generally, mastery of writing ability depends on the way the EFL learners are taught.At traditional method, the learners encounter with their essays which are marked up with red pen and rarely correct their errors or even pay attention to them and after several years of language learning, their writing skill remains undesirable.This is because learning to write can be seen as mutually supportive activities (Gen, 2005).Moreover, Kuzu (2007) asserted that at the traditional methodology teachers serve as the source of knowledge while learners serve as passive receivers (cited in Boumová, 2008).It seems in traditional EFL classes writing is more grammar, dictation, translation exercises than writing meaningful statements to convey the information or to express the idea.However, writing is the complicated activity (Rivers, 1981) and is a creative act which requires time and positive feedback to be done well (Constantinides, 2013).are the alternative names that were given to product-based writing approach (Raimes, 1983;Silva, 1990;cited in Tangpermpoon, 2008).Kroll (1990) described the following statements as the product-approach steps: (1) presentation of rules for writing, (2) demonstration of a text for discussion, analysis, (3) having learners write based on the text, (4) correction of the learners' paper.Gen (2005) described product-oriented writing approach as a traditional approach which focuses on teaching rules of how to make writing clear and easy to read, with particular emphasizing academic genre rules (p.111).This approach is called product, because it focuses on the completed written product, nevertheless it does not deal with strategies, techniques or processes which are involved in its production (Kroll, 1990).Product-approach concerns with error-free sentences or focuses on sentence-level writing.Moreover, the writing activity in this approach does not deal with strategies and processes in order to involve learners in writing process.Basically, product-approach requires students to product an error-free draft by following a fixed pattern.According to Tangpermpoon (2008) product approach reinforces writing skill in terms of grammatical and syntactical forms and based upon variety of activities in product-based writing, it raises student's awareness in writing from the lower level of language proficiency to advance.Besides all advantages of product approach, it suffers from a number of strong criticisms that have led teachers and researchers to reassess the nature of writing and the ways writing is taught (Matsuda, 2003, cited in Rusinovci, 2015).
In the mid-1960, as Kroll (1990) stated, there were a number of forces to change the way the writing has taught.The insight of process-based approach inquiry began to impact the teaching writing since this approach emphasizes on developing a personal voice in writing and focuses on a learner-centered classroom (Kroll, 1990), however, since this approach has a monolithic view of writing, it has come under serious scrutiny (Badger & White, 2000, cited in Rusinovci, 2015, p. 700).Hyland (2003) mentioned that the process approach has a major effect on understanding the nature of writing and the way writing is taught.Additionally, Kroll (1990) pointed out that while learners involve in writing processes, in fact they engage in their writing tasks through a cyclical approach rather than through a single-shot approach.Hyland (2003) stated that the process approach is complex, non-liner and recursive, involving frequent revisions.
At process approach, the teacher and instructor become facilitator rather than corrector or judge, and writer can perform better when has an assistant in processes of transferring ideas to paper in order to be read by another person (Barnet, 1992).Kim & Kim (2005) pointed out that the process approach emphasizes the writer as an independent producer of text so teachers allow their students' time and opportunity to develop students' abilities to plan, define a problem, or propose and evaluate solution (p. 4).Hyland (2003) stated that in North America, most of the writing teachers apply a process orientation as the main focus of their courses and they confirm that the mentioned approach has had a significant effect on writing teaching.Hyland (2003) added that at process approach, the teacher's role is to guide students through writing process and also develop their students' metacognitive awareness of their processes, that is, their ability to reflect on the strategies they use to write.
According to Rusinvoci (2015) the process approach emphasizes the importance of a recursive procedure of pre-writing, drafting, evaluating and revising.Some of the researchers claimed that the process-based approach has variety steps that at the current study only two kinds of the steps are mentioned.Firstly, Copper (1975, cited in Barnett, 1992) stated that process-based approach has several steps; namely; (1) prewriting, (2) planning the particular piece (3) starting the writing (4) decide about vocabulary choice, syntax, organization (5) reviewing what has been writing ( 6) reformulating ( 7) stopping ( 8) contemplating the finished piece (9) revising.Secondly; Hyland (2003, p. 11) presented following process model of writing:

Selection of topic: by teacher and or students
Prewriting: brainstorming, collecting data, note taking, etc.

Composing: getting ideas down on paper
Response to draft: teacher/peers respond to ideas, organization, and style Revising: reorganizing, style, adjusting to readers, refining ideas Response to revisions: teacher/peers respond to ideas, organization, and style Proofreading and editing: checking and correcting form, layout, evidence, etc.

Evaluation: teacher evaluates progress over the process
Publication: by class circulation or presentation, notice board, website, etc.

Follow-up tasks: to address weakness
The current study attempted to investigate the effect of two approaches (process/product) on EFL learners' writing skill.It aimed to study their writings in terms of accuracy, fluency, and using discourse markers (DMs).There are differential definitions of DMs that only several of them are presented here.Schiffrin (1987) defines discourse markers at a more theoretical level as members of a functional class of verbal and nonverbal devices which provide contextual coordinates for ongoing talk.Discourse markers are "sequentially dependent elements which bracket unit of talk (Schiffrin, 1987, p. 31)."Sharpling (2012) claimed that without sufficient discourse markers in a piece of writing, a text would not seem logically constructed and the connections between the different sentences and paragraphs would not be obvious.Within the past fifteen years or so there has been an increasing interest in the theoretical status of discourse markers, focusing on what they are, what they mean, and what functions they manifest in texts (Jalilifar, 2008).Fraser (1999) proposes that discourse markers are conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositional phrases that connect two sentences or clauses together.Redeker (1991, cited in Jalilifar, 2008) suggested that discourse markers link not only contiguous sentences, but the current sentence or utterance with its immediate context.
One way of accounting for language performance is by examining accuracy and fluency of the language produced.According to Skehan (1996), successful Performance in task-based contexts include: Accuracy, in which the performer tries to make as few errors as possible, and fluency, the rate of speech production.Fluency is an important factor in the writer's abilities to produce comprehension texts.On the other hand, accuracy is the writer's ability to produce grammatical correct sentence.
Considering the mentioned issues above, the present study seeks to answer to the following questions: RQ1: Is there any differential effect of process and product approach on the writing skill of Iranian EFL learners?RQ2: Which of these instructional approaches (process or product) is more effective?RQ3: Which of these instructional approaches (process or product) has significant and positive effect on Iranian EFL learners' attitude toward writing skill?Three main research hypotheses address for the present study were: H1: There is a differential effect of process and product approach on the writing skill of Iranian EFL learners.H2: Process approach is more effective than product approach on Iranian EFL learners' writing skill.H3: Process approach has significant and positive effect on Iranian EFL learners' attitude toward writing skill.

Research Design
Since this study attempted to study the effect of two approaches namely; process and product, on EFL learners' writing ability and also on their attitudes toward writing skill, it is a qusi-experimental research.Moreover, the convenience non-random sampling procedure was applied to select the participants of the current study.More specifically, the study's two approaches (process/product) were known as independent variables and their effects (if any) on writing ability and participants' attitude toward writing skill were identified as dependent variables.Moreover, since the purpose of the study was to examine the effect of differential approaches on writing skill in terms of accuracy, fluency and using DMs.Therefore the degree of accuracy, fluency and the participants' use of DMs in writing were regarded as the dependent variables.

Participants
The study was conducted in Iran with 60 Iranian EFL learners including 42 females and 18 males with age range of 20-32.In order to guarantee the learners' writing proficiency level, they took a PET exam.Then they were randomly divided into three groups; one control group and two experimental groups.The first experimental group (G1) was taught through process-based approach and the second group (G2) was taught via product-based approach.

Evaluation Scales
The researcher applied three differential scales to measure writings with regard to accuracy, fluency and using DMs, separately.
Holistic measurement of accuracy was used to measure linguistic accuracy, grammar, vocabulary, and mechanic aspects of writings.The fluency of writings was measured holistically through a scale.At this scale, the writing's flow degree of the sentences was evaluated holistically.Through discourse markers scale, it was attempted to evaluate the DMs degree at participants' writing tasks.

Attitudinal Questionnaire
Since the study aimed to study the impact of the mentioned approaches on participants' attitude toward writing skill, therefore, an attitudinal questionnaire (Appendix A) was applied to examine the goal.The questionnaire was translated to EFL learners' native language (Persain).It included fifteen statements and participants were asked to state whether they agree or disagree with these items by marking one of the responses ranging from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree".

Preliminary English Test (PET) Proficiency Test
In order to evaluate the participants' English proficiency level, a paper-based PET exam was utilized.The proficiency test that was used for the current study was taken from the Cambridge Preliminary English Test (PET).It included twenty-five questions and it was going to test the EFL learners' proficiency level.The respondents had thirty minutes to answer the questions.

Procedure
At first step, all the participants took the PET proficiency test.Sixty subjects who had obtained 50 or more out of 100 were chosen and randomly divided into two experimental groups and one control group, each consisting of 20 participants.For the pre-test, the crucial part was to choose a topic which should be authentic, interesting and challenging.The selected topic was studied by several EFL teachers and it was validated by them.Three groups were asked to write about the topic and their writings were evaluated with regard to accuracy, fluency and using DMs.Next, the participants of three groups were asked to respond to the attitude questionnaire.The results of their responses were kept to be compared with the results of the questionnaire that they were going to answer after treatment sessions.
At treatment step, the control group received typical instruction.At each unit, one of the learning objectives was "writing task".The control group's participants were told to write a paragraph about the related topic.They were reminded to use the grammatical structures which were referred to the unit's objects.Toward their writing performance, they received only explicit recast feedback.The first experimental group (G1) was taught through process approach.The main purpose of this approach was to focus on the writing process rather than the final product.The main writing processes of this study basically included three steps; namely, pre-writing, during-writing and post-writing.Involving participants in finding a topic keep them away from being forced to write about something that they aren't interested in or have no or little information about it.Therefore at the first step, teacher (researcher) and the members of G1 found an idea and organized a topic which they had knowledge and were interested in.At pre-writing step, teacher made them write everything that comes into their head without worrying about any grammatical, structural, etc. mistakes.After brainstorming, at the second step, they were asked to plan and structure the sentences and write them in more organizing way.While drafting was over, they shared their writings with other learners and attempted to revise their mistakes.Moreover, the teacher accompanied with them during revisional process.At the post-writing step, the writing works were edited and re-read by the teacher.The instructor made learners add or remove any conjunction or cohesion markers.Additionally the teacher had them add phrases to make sentences more smoothly.At last step of post-writing process; the teacher proofread the writing works for any spelling, vocabulary, and grammatical points.At final step, the participants wrote the final draft.
According to Tangpermpoon (2008), there are a variety of activities in product-based writing approach which can be used to raise EFL learner's awareness in foreign language writing such as; use of model paragraphs, sentence combining, and rhetorical pattern exercises.At the current study, the researcher applied model paragraph and sentence combining exercises.To carry out product-based approach for G2, the instructor utilized several paragraphs as models.Every session, the participants were asked to write a paragraph which they should follow the model.They had freedom for making any changes at writing the passage.Then their writing works were revised and the teacher attempted to raise their writing awareness especially in using DMs, grammatical structures, or sentence structures.At next step, they were given several sentences and asked to combine as logically as possible.Through combining sentence exercise, the researcher aimed at promoting learners' knowledge at syntactic categories, choosing accurate word, agreement of phrases, etc.At last the teacher edited their sentences and revised any errors and had the learners write a correct form.The groups were received twelve treatment sessions.At the end of twelfth session, the post-test was presented to three groups to measure the learners' writing ability with regard to using DMs, accuracy, and fluency.In order to find out any changes at the participants' attitude toward writing skill, they were asked to answer the same questionnaire.

Data Analysis and Result
Kappa.Sav was used in order to examine inter-rater reliability (between two raters) of scores obtained from the accuracy, fluency, and using DMs scales.The computed value of Kappa.Sav for the accuracy was 0.75 with value p< .000and for using DMs was (0.78, p < .000)and for the fluency was (0.69, p< .000)which indicated that there were acceptable levels of agreement between raters.
Table 1 shows no statistically significant differences among groups' pre-test writing scores with regard to accuracy, fluency, and using DMs.For the normality assumption, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Table 2 shows that the distribution was normal (p>.05).Descriptive statistics for the writing pre-test were reported in Table 3.As Table 3 shows the performance of the experimental groups was similar to that of the control group on the writing test in terms of accuracy, fluency, and using DMs before treatment.Result of ANOVA Test for participants' attitude toward writing skill is presented in Table 4.According to this table there are no significant differences among groups' attitude toward writing skill before they were taught through alternative approaches.As it was intended to examine whether the EFL learners' writing ability would be statistically different among the three groups (G1, G2, and control group) after the treatment, a one way ANOVA was conducted.As shown in Table 5, statistically significant group differences were observed in the writing post-test scores in terms of accuracy, fluency, and using DMs.In order to find the significant differences among groups, the Scheffe post-hoc test was used.Results (Table 6) show that the mean score of the G1 was significantly different from that of the G2 and the control group.All this suggested that G1 which was taught through process-based approach outperformed both the G2 (taught via product-based approach) and the control group.Table 7 presents the results of ANOVA test for participants' attitude toward writing skill after the treatment was over.It shows that the participants who were taught through process-based approach have positive attitude as compared with the second experimental group and the control group.Therefore it can be said that process-approach has positive impact on EFL learners' attitude toward writing skill.At current study, to test study's hypotheses, ANOVA test was utilized.As Tables 1 & 3 indicated, there was no difference across groups' writing performance before treatment.However, Table 5 showed that there was significantly different among groups' writing task when treatment sessions were over.Therefore, it can be said that the first hypothesis is accepted that there is a differential effect of process-based and product-based approaches on the EFL learners' writing ability.For the second hypothesis, the result of Scheffe (Table 6) also indicated that the process-based approach has positive effect on learners' writing ability.Therefore, once again it can be said that the second hypothesis is also accepted.Similarly, the Table 7 confirmed the positive and significant effect process approach on learners' attitude toward writing skill.Thus, this means that the third hypothesis is also accepted.

Discussion & Conclusion
The present study investigated the effect of two alternative approaches namely; process and product, on accuracy, fluency and using DMs of EFL writing and was an attempt to find out a way to increase the EFL learning writing attitude.The results indicated that the participants who were taught through process-approach outperformed the other groups regarding accuracy, fluency, and using DMs.At the process approach, the writers work on the writing task from the beginning until its end.Using the mentioned approach at the classrooms enable learners to explore their ideas & thoughts, discover the meaning, and also develop their own writing step by step.
Considering the positive effect of process-approach on learners' writing skill, it can be concluded that the study's participants were able to learn how to write in English.Since the instructor guided and helped them step by step by giving feedback, they could improve their writing skill.Additionally, because they compose the draft themselves, it gave them more positive attitude toward writing skill.As Zamel (1983, cited in Barnett, 1992) stated that more proficient writers treat writing as a process and perform writing task before worrying about grammatical and accuracy aspects of writing.Thus, the current study attempted to encourage G1's participants to act like skilled writers.At the process approach, writing is broken down into its component parts, thus by this way, its frustration, and complexity would reduce and enable learners to achieve better results.Moreover, the results caused to change the learners' attitude toward writing that writing is not some complex mental operation.According to Berninger & Fan (2007) those with positive attitude toward writing invest more in it, whereas the learners who have negative attitude avoid writing as much as possible.The present study was going to find out the ways to increase EFL learners' attitude and also involve the learners with negative attitude in the process of the learning.
It would be unadvisable to conclude from the study's findings that product-approach is not a beneficial approach for writing teaching.According to Hyland (2003) writing can be seen as a product constructed from grammatical and lexical knowledge, and writing development is considered to be the result of imitating and manipulating model provided by the teacher.If students are not exposed to native-like models of written texts, their errors in writing are more likely to persist (Myles, 2000;cited in Rusinovci, 2015).Moreover Hyland (2003) stated that for many who adopt product-approach, writing is considered as a means of reinforcing language patterns through habit formation and having learners to write is only the way to test their ability to produce grammatical sentences.However Barnett (1992) believed that when learners involve in product approach, they concentrate on surface level rather than on communicating a message coherently.Meanwhile writing is regarded as a means of communication in process-approach.Rohman (1965) pointed out that "looking at writing as a process also implied understanding writing as a series of draft" (cited in Barnett, 1992, p. 18).
In spite of the results of the current study, the process based writing has some limitation.Tangpermpoon (2008) stated that using process approach make learners spend quite a long time to complete one particular piece of writing in the classroom.Taking so long time to achieve a writing task can be considered as a shortcoming of the process-based approach.
In sum, in order to teach EFL learners to write, teacher should keep the strength of the process based writing approach for using as a part of teaching approaches.On the other hand, curriculum planners can consider the learners' attitude to make the learning positions more pleasurable.Moreover, the result of this study could be useful for teachers to increase their students' attitude toward the writing skill through using process based approach.

Table 1 .
ANOVA test for Ppre-test scores among three groups

Table 2 .
Test of normality for writing pre-test scores across groups

Table 3 .
Descriptive statistics for the writing pre-test across groups

Table 4 .
Result of ANOVA for participants' attitude toward writing skill before treatment

Table 5 .
Result of ANOVA for writing post-test across groups

Table 6 .
Scheffe test for writing post-test

Table 7 .
Result of ANOVA for participants' attitude toward writing skill after treatment