FOSTERING WRITING SKILLS OF STUDENTS IN THE FOUNDATION PROGRAMME AT DHOFAR UNIVERSITY-SALALAH OMAN EMPLOYING GRAPHIC ORGANISERS: AN ACTION RESEARCH

As students age, the expectations to use more complicated syntax and discourse structures in spoken and written language increase. Writing becomes more difficult for students in EFL environments because they find it challenging to understand cognitive techniques. The target learners must also acquire rules like language, spelling, punctuation, and syntax to generate a written essay. Graphic organisers help students create sentences and paragraphs with greater sensitivity to syntactic and narrative structures. Therefore, this study investigated the effectiveness of graphic organisers in assisting students in writing better. The intended audience consisted of 40 students of B.A. English majors at Dhofar University. The research was carried out in 2022–23 between September and November. It is the result of an action research initiative. By comparing spontaneously written tasks from the pre- to post-test, the effect of graphic organisers was evaluated seven weeks after the intervention. The findings imply that graphic organisers can be a valuable tool in the writing process for producing sentences and narratives with elaborate content and discourse structures. The study's results indicated that graphic organisers improved students' writing abilities in content and organisation. Furthermore, the student's mean scores, which climbed from 15.6 on the pre-test to 26.7 on the post-test cycle, show that they have improved after incorporating graphic organisers in the writing tasks. Eventually, the student feedback indicated that graphic organisers boosted their motivation levels. According to their input, they preferred using visual organisers when writing.