The impact of building a writing habit using dictogloss on students’ written product

Abstract

The present research work aims at analyzing second-year students’ written productions at the Department of Letters and the English language at university of Frères Mentouri, Constantine, for the purpose of identifying the most frequent lexical errors committed, understanding the potential sources of their production and, most importantly, investigating the effectiveness of building a writing habit for students as a remedy to reduce their lexical errors production and ameliorate their writing quality. Also, this study aims to investigate teachers’ practices in writing courses and test students’ attitudes and perceptions towards the application of dictogloss as a means to built their writing habit. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that adopting this latter in writing classes would have a positive impact on students’ written production. To achieve the research objectives, a pre-post quasi-experimental design and two questionnaires, one for sixteen teachers of writing and another for the fifty students under study, were used for the data collection. By adopting James’ (1998) lexical errors taxonomy, results indicated that distortions preceded by collocations represent the most recurrent errors types committed in students’ writing. The in-depth scrutiny of their errors revealed that their presence is primarily an evidence of the participants’ incomplete and lack of vocabulary knowledge in form and meaning, and influence of prior languages, Arabic and French, that resulted in negative transfer. In addition, the analysis of the experiment demonstrated students’ lexical errors reduction after integrating dictogloss as a way to build their writing habit, and thus, confirmed the research hypothesis. Furthermore, the analysis of the teachers’ questionnaire revealed their occasional implementation of writing activities that enhance learners’ vocabulary knowledge and their unfamiliarity with the dictogloss task. Moreover, students’ questionnaire exhibited their positive attitudes for the dictogloss application in class. Eventually, we advocate for the creation of an enjoyable writing atmosphere where learners are exposed to constant writing activities, as dictogloss, that build their writing habit to help them improve their vocabulary knowledge and enhance their writing skill.