In language education, one of the learning goals is to improve students' writing skills. Writing is a complementary skill to other language skills. Writing is a skill that supplements other language skills. Zen (2005), Barkaoui (2007), and Hidi and Poscolo (2007) point out that writing activities can be used to enforce students’ linguistic competencies, cognitive competencies, and sociocultural competencies. For example, teachers can reinforce vocabulary, speaking, listening, reading, and grammar skills through writing activities. Similarly, teachers can ask students to reflect on their prior experiences, attitudes, and feelings related to the materials presented in the classroom. These reinforce cognitive competencies. Classroom activities that include note-taking and summarizing main points from earlier presented speaking and listening instructions can enhance students' communication skills. Thus, to achieve academic success, students at all levels of education must develop effective writing skills.
Nevertheless, unlike other language skills, writing is a demanding skill for various reasons: It involves, for instance, complex practices such as phonology, morphology, semantics, and syntactic structure (Hussain, 2017; Rao, 2019). In addition, as we write, we handle various activities like composing ideas, expressing intentions, solving problems, translating and reviewing, determining contents, choosing words, deciding ways of arguing, and deciding how to express ourselves simultaneously. (Bulqiyah, Mahbu, Nugraneni ,2021; Al-Rawahi and Al-Balushi ,2015).
When students enroll in post-secondary schools, their academic expectations are changed. In these stages, understanding course materials and summarizing ideas is not enough. The focus of this stage should be on exploring and analyzing ideas, making connections, and thinking about issues in novel ways (Horkoff & Mclean, 2015). To engage in these activities, students need writing skills. According to Defazio, Jones, Tannat, and Hook (2010), while some students develop high writing proficiency, others struggle. Attitudes, motivation, teaching methods, study skills, materials used, etc. contribute to the difficulty of writing. Paker and Erarslan (2015) contend that if students have a positive attitude towards writing activities, they are eager to engage in every activity that is assigned to them by their teachers or on their own initiative to practice the skill within and outside the classroom. Students with higher anxiety may not be motivated to participate in activities, and that results in their weak writing performance. According to Zaid (2011), Sarkhoush (2013), and Abedianpour and Omidvari (2018), students with a positive attitudes toward composition activities engage in those activities for sustained periods of time. On the other hand, students' success in writing depends on their engagement with writing activities for a sufficient amount of time. Paker and Erarslan (2015), as well as Jabali (2018), state that attitudes play a direct role in student achievement in writing. This positive attitude can be sustained by the supportive roles that teachers play while teaching writing skills. Hence, teachers should be able to design engaging tasks without making students feel pressured.
In addition to writing attitudes, writing performance is strongly affected by students' motivation. Motivation fosters engagement in composing tasks, which leads to more practice in learning activities. Süğümlüa and Çinpolatc, (2019) maintain that students’ level of motivation is a determinist factor in students’ writing performance. As students' motivation to write involves the whole process of writing, it is crucial to turn their writing performance into a real product. Hidi and Bascolo (2006) state that motivation for writing is broken down into two parts: having something to say, this connects to both their identity and their interests, while experiencing a liberated state in which they have a range of easier topics to choose from. Teachers' regular feedback and diligent effort motivate students to write.
Since it is such a broad concept, it is difficult for researchers to analyze the various aspects of motivation (Hidi & Bascolo, 2007). In writing, there are four constructs of motivation identified by MacArthur, Philippakos, and Graham (2016): These include self-efficacy, achievement goal orientation, beliefs, and affect. Based on the factor analysis they conducted, the authors identified self-efficacy and affect are single factors; goal orientation contains three factors, which include mastery goal, performance approach goal, and goal avoidance. Belief on the other hand has two factors: content and convention. This study focuses only on one the factors that is writing achievement goal orientations.
Learning through reflection which is not a newly developed concept has a positive contribution (Dewey, 1909). According to Colemer, Pallisera, and Fullana (2013) and Hyeler (2015) reflection, a process of exploring experiences to develop understanding and appreciation, is a fundamental feature of transformative learning. Learning through reflection is not only a question of acquiring knowledge or skills; but a matter of redevising the relationship between knowledge, practice, and experience. Through reflecting on values, attitudes, and emotions learners transform their understanding of the subject matter to construct their own knowledge or conception. Reflective learning can be a very interesting learning experience since it engages learners actively in the learning process, which also serves as a tool for self-assessment. Teachers who use a reflective approach to teaching enable students to participate in the meaning-making process (Xhaferi & Xhaferi, 2017).
1.2 Statement of the problem
Several studies have shown that students in higher education in Ethiopia are weak in their writing skills (Zeleke, 2017; Yelay, 2017; Mandefro, Asnakech & Alemayehu, 2018; Habtamu, 2018; Surur & Dengela, 2019; Mulgeta, 2021). In addition to observing that university students struggle with their writing skills, the researchers discovered that students have an increased apprehension towards writing tasks. Even those students who appear to do better than their peers in the writing activities, they seem to engage in the activities only because their instructor asks them to do so. This indicates that learners are ineffective in their writing performance because of their negative attitudes about writing activities. Additionally, they have difficulty setting goals that will help them improve their writing skills. Hence, the researchers were motivated to investigate if reflection-supported learning of writing has any positive effect on students' writing attitudes and their writing achievement goal orientations.
So far, no studies have been conducted in this area in Ethiopia. There have been a few studies conducted in the international context. For instance, Hemmati and Soltanpour (2012) compared the effects of reflective portfolio writing and dialogue journal writing on Iranian EFL students' grammatical accuracy and overall writing abilities. Abbas (2016) conducted a study on the effect of reflection-supported process-based teaching writing on Iraqi EFL students’ writing performances and attitudes toward writing. The findings of Abbas’s study showed that participant students’ writing performance and writing attitudes improved due to their reflection on the essays they wrote. The earlier studies are different in context and focus from the present research in that the current research uses reflection guideline phases which Abbas (2016) adapted from Gibb’s (1988) model of the reflective cycle to get the participants in the treatment group to deliberately reflect on their produced paragraphs to find out if their writing attitude and writing achievement goal orientations were affected.
The study specifically intended to:
- investigate the effect of reflection-supported learning of writing on students’ writing attitude;
- find out the effect of reflection-supported learning of writing on students’ writing achievements goal orientations.
About the specific objectives of the research, the following research hypotheses were formulated.
- There is a statistically significant difference in writing attitude between students who learn writing through a reflection-supported approach and those who learn writing through the usual method;
- There is a statistically significant difference in writing goal orientations between students who learn writing through a reflection-supported approach and those who learn writing through the usual method.