'Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM Press)'
Abstract
Many pedagogical approaches have attempted to systematically integrate form-focused instruction (FFI) into L2
writing, namely the process approach, the product approach, the post-process approach, and the process-genre
approach. However, these approaches continue to provide conflicting findings on how they can improve students’
overall writing skills and grammatical accuracy and fail to consider the sociocognitive aspect of L2 writing. Thus, the
current study examined the effects of a combined sociocognitive-transformative (ST) approach and FFI on L2 writers’
complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in writing. This quasi-experimental study involved 72 students from a private
university in Pakistan. The findings revealed that L2 writers significantly improved in all fluency measures and in
certain accuracy and complexity measures after being exposed to the treatment. The improvement in writing fluency
was attributed to their increased rhetorical awareness and focus on content during writing. Meanwhile, the
improvement in accuracy was linked to the contextualised teaching of linguistic items and learners’ psycholinguistic
readiness in learning these items. Finally, the mixed results in fine-grained measures of accuracy and complexity were linked to the possible interaction between these measures. Implications for L2 writing pedagogy and future studies are discussed