Hadi Hosseini

Teacher Training University

Tehran

January 2003

ABSTRACT

Teaching of ESL writing has undergone great changes in the twentieth century,

particularly from 1945, from viewing language as an end product to viewing it as

an interactive process in which students play a determining role. Four main

approaches that have been proposed in this regard are Controlled Composition,

Current-Traditional Rhetoric, The Process Approach and English for Academic

Purposes (Erazmus, 1960; Pincas, 1962; Kaplan, 1967; Taylor, 1981; Zamel,

1982; Reid, 1984; Horowitz, 1986; Raimes 1991). Each of these approaches has a

distinctive focus on form, writer, reader, and content. Consequently, responding

to students’ errors has undergone great changes. While earlier approaches of ESL

writing emphasized the correction of all errors by the teacher, the most recent

approaches, which are mainly task-based, consider students responsible for

correcting their own errors. The emphasis has changed, of course, to just those

errors that may hinder communication (Van Houten, 1980; Terrell, 1985; Byrne,

1988; Power 2002). However, teachers need to inform the students of the quality

of their pieces of writing. Therefore, teachers have to use some criteria to grade

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the students’ written works as objectively as possible (Magnan 1985; Chastain

1988; Hyde et al. 1997).

Apart from different approaches of teaching writing and different writing

correction methods, personality traits such as Extroversion and Introversion are

believed to have an impact on students’ learning in that students with different

personality types view the language and language learning differently

(Schumann, 1975; Fillmore, 1979; Stern, 1983; Brown, 1994; Shepherd, 2002).

To reinvestigate the effect of self-correction method as a task-based activity

and as an alternative to the traditional teacher-correction method, on the one

hand, and to compare the effect of personality traits of Extroversion/Introversion,

on the other hand, on the writing improvement of the pre-intermediate students,

the following two Null-Hypotheses were proposed: (1) The two methods of self-

correction and teacher-correction are not significantly different in affecting the

students’ writing improvement. (2) There is no relationship between students’

personality types and their writing improvement.

To carry out the study, 128 pre-intermediate Iranian male EFL students were

selected through administration of Nelson English Language Test (NELT) and

employing the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). The participants were

assigned into four main groups: (1) extroverts who corrected their own writings;

(2) extroverts whose writings were corrected by the teacher; (3) introverts who

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corrected their own writings; (4) introverts whose writings were corrected by the

teacher. The four groups received a five-week period of treatment.

The obtained results showed that personality type had no significant effect on

students’ improvement in writing. However, correction method proved to be

significantly effective at 0.5, with self-correction method showing greater effect

on writing improvement. Therefore, the first Null-Hypothesis was rejected in the

present study while the second Null-Hypothesis was supported.

Key words: extroversion, introversion, self-correction, teacher-correction, EFL

writing development, writing feedback.

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