IMPROVING SAUDI ENGLISH LEARNERS’ SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING THROUGH SELF-REGULATED STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Saudi L2 learners in English departments in Saudi Arabia have difficulty inmastering academic writing. Many studies attribute this deficiency to the product-oriented approach that is the dominant teaching style in Saudi Arabia. The study is a response to this observation and investigates the effect of self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) instruction for TREE (Topic sentence, Reason, Explanation, Ending) strategy, which represents the process approach for Saudi L2 learners. A pre-test and post-test measured the impact of the SRSD+TREE intervention for the 25 participants in the experimental group and the 26 in the control group. Results indicated that students in the experimental group had a significant improvement and outperformed their counterparts in the control group. More specifically, participants in the experimental group had significantly higher scores in their total essay evaluations and essay length. This indicates that the process-oriented -approach is more beneficial for Saudi L2 learners than the product approach and is highly recommended in teaching writing in English departments in Saudi universities.