Interpreting Data

Concerning the contribution of speaking to the development of writing in question eight, most of the informants answer positively. Sometimes good speakers are good readers and skilled writers too, but in the case of second-year LMD students, most of them manage to speak slightly better but are not able to write appropriately and coherently; they do not know how to compose ideas, and do not know when and how to punctuate. Speaking could be acquired from listening frequently to the native people.

Teachers of composition classes use the speaking skill as a technique to reinforce the ideas, expressions and sentences in their students’ minds. In this vein, Hurbert (2017) opined that scholars use dialogue in writing classrooms for the ultimate aim of having a positive impact on certain components of teaching composition, particularly in the planning and revision stages. This is why teachers need to focus on the speaking for instructing writing as a process.

In question one, only twenty (20) out of seventy-six (76) questioned students claimed thinking in the target language. The rest of the informants use Arabic or French, i.e. they first speculate in Arabic and then translate their ideas into the English language. Likewise, some learners also use French L2 as a means to help them compose in English. Translating from Arabic or French could be a habit that is used by a wide range of the students, for they are not well trained or advised on how to reckon in English, and that what has been observed in the ethnographic observation.

The translation is classified under the category of “cognitive strategies” by O’Malley and Chamot (2015), in which they consider translation as being the first language for understanding and writing the foreign language. Nevertheless, it is known that those who translate to some extent whether from L1 or L2 into English are found to be less proficient students and the former refers to as “self-instruction”, and are using such a strategy to solve problems, or mainly to overcome their writing difficulties as far as cognitive tasks are concerned (Cohen, 2015). These results support the second research hypothesis which states that second-year students employ metacognitive strategies when writing extended essays, i.e. the great majority of the students use translation as a technique that helps them write.