Abstract:

 Due to the poor writing skills of university students, a multidisciplinary theoretical-and-pedagogical e-framework of web-based instruction (WBI) called Web-based Cognitive Writing Instruction (WeCWI) was employed to improve learners' writing performance by focusing on literacy, language, cognitive, and psychological development. Language acquisition, composition studies, cognitive theories, and e-learning are incorporated to design and develop two distinctive blogs, web widgets (widgetised) and hypertext (non-widgetised), as teaching resources. To investigate the impact of a widgetised blog (WB) compared to a non-widgetised blog (NWB) on learners' writing performance, a quasi-experimental design was used in this eight-week study between two groups of undergraduate students. The research instruments (WB and NWB) and procedures were pilot-tested prior data collection. A pre-test and a post-test in the form of argumentative essay writing were given to the students during the first and last weeks of class to assess their writing abilities. One-way ANCOVA was used to see if there was a statistically significant difference between the WB and NWB groups’ post-test scores. Based on the results, the writing performance between WB and NWB groups was different significantly, which the WB group outperformed the NWB group. WeCWI uses the capabilities of web widgets to transform blog content into a dynamic L2 learning environment to promote not only the learners' literacy growth in reading and writing skills, but also the user interaction among its content, learners, and instructor. Therefore. a supplementary online ESL writing application is strongly recommended to enhance the second language learners’ writing competence.