In 21st century, the proficiency in Academic English for higher education is getting crucial. In particular, academic writing is considered essential because it is used extensively both for academic purposes and professional communication. However, the writing skill has been claimed to be difficult by many students. In order to facilitate the students, English lecturers are challenged to find alternatives and innovations in teaching and learning activitiesto facilitate students’ needs. Among the choices, aprocess-based approach in essaywritingmay become a method for lecturers to provide scaffolding for the students.
This study aimed to investigate the implementation of a process-based approach used in essay writing and to examine how the process-based improves students’ writing performance.A program evaluation design was employed in this research and to some extent was one pretest posttest design. Data were obtained from three typesources, namely classroom observation, students’ reflective journal and portfolios of students’ writing. After the implementation of process-based approach, the findings revealed that the students have made significantprogresswith their writing performance that is shown from the improvement of mean score from pre-test = 63.6154 to post-test = 74.5385. It is because the students got more opportunities to experience the stages of writing process; in addition to their own self-editing process, they also got evaluative and constructive feedback from their peers and their lecturers. |