A Study on the Effects of Writing Prompts on Korean EFL High School Students’ Narrative Writing Performance

This study aims to explore the effects of writing prompts on high school students’ writing performance. 124 first-year high school students participated in this study and they were divided into the bare-prompt group and the framed-prompt group. Again the two groups were divided into the sub-groups of higher-level participants and lower-level participants each. The data was analyzed in terms of quantity and quality, and the results are as follows: In quantitative terms, the framed-prompt group did not show significantly better results than the bare-prompt group, and the same can be said for both the higher-level students and the lower-level students of each group even if a writing prompt showed indications that it might be slightly more suitable and beneficial to the lower-level students of the framed-prompt group. In qualitative terms, in contrast, the framed-prompt group showed significantly better results than the bare-prompt group on the whole, but while the higher-level students of the framed-prompt group did not perform significantly better than their counterparts of the bare-prompt group, the lower-level students in the former group showed quite a different result. These results were presented in detail and their pedagogical implications were further discussed in comparison to previous studies.