The Impact of Invention Techniques upon Students’ Compositional Writing in EFL

This article reports on the qualitative findings into an experimental study into the impact of invention techniques upon students’ writing. Set in the context of Egyptian EFL teaching in a university setting, the study investigated how students’ composition writing was affected by the use of invention techniques to support the process of writing. The article outlines the principal characteristics of students’ writing at the outset of the study, and then reports on the same students’ writing after using the invention techniques. Statistical data highlighted how the two experimental groups had improved their writing more than the control group at a level of statistical significance. This article describes the nature of that improvement and suggests that invention techniques have a benefit to EFL writers which goes beyond that of simply supporting the generation of ideas.