Abstract

This study investigates the level of effectiveness that the process genre approach has on increasing and decreasing Saudi advanced EFL undergraduates’ Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF) in reaction writing. Sixteen level six participants were recruited from the College of Languages and Translation at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University. All participants undertook a pre-test and a post-test on reaction writing. After collecting 32 essays, they were analyzed based on 55 indices of CAF, and then a Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test was applied to compare each CAF construct/sub-construct measure’s mean in the pre-test with its mean in the post-test, and between the total mean of all measures for each CAF construct/sub-construct in the pre-test with their total means in the post-test. The findings showed that there were no significant total or partial impacts of the process genre approach on participants’ reaction essay syntactic complexity, lexical density, lexical sophistication, and fluency. However, the results indicated that there were only partial effects of the approach (across some measures) on participants’ reaction essay lexical variation and accuracy. Finally, the study yields several pedagogical implications and recommendations for EFL writing instructors, educators, and researchers.

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