Abstract:

As supported by the two-semester course performance analysis, the complexity of writing skill, low literacy skills, interlanguage errors, low language proficiency, lack of critical thinking, low information literacy, L2 writing anxiety constitute the poor writing skill among one of the Malaysian universities’ undergraduates. A solution focusing on the literacy, language, cognitive, and psychological developments was highly demanded to improve their writing performance and critical thinking. Based on this research gap, Web-based Cognitive Writing Instruction (WeCWI) was developed. In response to the writing needs of UiTM learners and instructors as well as the limitations found in the existing web-based writing systems, there was a call for WeCWI-enabled WBI tool using blog to facilitate the L2 writing process. This pilot study aims to investigate the main effects on writing performance and critical thinking of using the blog as the WeCWI-enabled WBI tool and to find out the difference on writing performance and critical thinking level by conducting the pre-and-post tests. By opting quasi-experimental design, convenient sampling method was opted. During the two-week pilot study, three research instruments were used. The results of the pilot test show that writing performance and critical thinking had improved slightly and there is no significant difference respectively between the pre-test and the post-test for writing performance and critical thinking based on the analysis of two-tailed paired samples T-Test (p > .05). This pilot test’s results would be served to refine WeCWI-enabled WBI tool’ interface design, research procedure, and instruments prior to carrying out the future study.