Students' attitude and motivation towards concept mapping-based prewriting strategies

This study proposes two collaborative concept mapping-based prewriting strategies to help Chinese EFL learners with a reading-to-write task - reading an unfinished story and then writing its ending. Collaborative concept mapping enables students to visualize the storyline with the help of peer scaffolding. The two proposed strategies used collaborative fill-in-the-blanks concept maps (CFCM) and collaboratively constructed concept maps (CCCM). Classes 1 (N = 48) and 2 (N = 47) participated in the experiment and respectively learned the strategies of CFCM and CCCM. The collected data included students' concept maps, reading-to-write products, responses to questionnaires on attitudes and motivation, and learning journals, which were analyzed by t tests, path analysis, and qualitative coding. The results indicated that students using CCCM showed more positive attitudes and higher motivation than those using CFCM; however, the two strategies shared similar effectiveness in developing students' reading-to-write abilities. Students found the proposed strategies effective in helping them write the story ending.