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Résumé :
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Most of the Algerian students find it difficult to master all the aspects of writing and to produce acceptable paragraphs or essays. This is due to the complexity of the writing skill and also to the writing instruction which remains form-focused. This research work attempts to investigate the effects of the Competency-Based Approach on first-year students’ writing achievement in the department of Foreign Languages at Biskra University and more precisely in the section of English. It aims to show that if this approach failed in middle and secondary education, it could be a success at the university. This is based on the belief that if a socio-cognitive writing approach, complying with the principles of the Competency-Based Approach, were implemented in teaching writing, it would succeed in promoting students’ writing in terms of fluency, accuracy and grammatical complexity. This can be realized through the use of the Process-Genre Approach which is assumed to be the most appropriate one in developing students’ writing proficiency under the Competency-Based Approach. In order to confirm or reject the hypothesis that the implementation of such a writing approach would bring on positive results if compared to the Product Approach, a control group (N = 40) and an experimental group (N=40) were selected for a quasi-experimental study. This investigation was carried out, first, by the administration of two questionnaires, one to teachers of written expression (N=10) and the other one to a sample of first-year students (N=180) to check out the effects of the Competency-Based Approach. Second, we compared the pre and post experiment writing tests to show the effects of the treatment. This was supplemented by the qualitative data gathered from two post interviews conducted with a sample of the same informants (N=15) and from the teacher who implemented the experiment. In fact, the pre-experiment questionnaires revealed the failure of the Competency-Based Approach in developing students’ writing proficiency in previous education. Conversely, the scores obtained from the post t-tests, measuring the four areas formulated in the hypotheses, if compared to those obtained in the pre-test, revealed that the participants achieved statistically greater levels in fluency, accuracy and complexity. In addition, the qualitative data gathered from the two post interviews validated the efficiency of the Process-Genre Approach if compared to the Product Approach used previously. Summing up, both qualitative and quantitative findings obtained in this research indicate that such a socio-cognitive approach can help students develop their writing competencies because they experience a whole writing process and they learn about the organizational structure as well as the linguistic features of different genres. All this develops students’ writing competencies necessary for conveying appropriate messages in real situations.
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