Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to examine the effect of conducting De Bono’s six thinking hats activity on developing the paragraph writing skills of university students. Two groups of students studying the course Technical Writing in Business (NAJM 167) of Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University were chosen to achieve this objective. Pre- and post-tests were conducted for both the groups to determine the difference in their mean scores. Both the groups were given the task of writing a paragraph as a pre-test before conducting the activity. Then, in the experiment section, six thinking hats activity was conducted six times, each time changing the hat color of the groups. As the students had class for 100 minutes three times a week, the experimental group did the activity six times for two weeks. The control group was taught the textbook verbatim. The two groups were given the task of writing a paragraph again as a post-test. The paragraphs were evaluated. At 5% significance levels, two-tailed test was applied. The scores of the control group were much lower than the experimental group in the paragraph writing test. The statistics also showed significant differences between mean scores of the two groups. The results prove the effectiveness of six thinking hats activity in developing writing skills of university students. Therefore, the present study recommends that it is appropriate for EFL teachers in Saudi Arabia to make students do the six thinking hats activity along with other activities given in the textbook in order to improve their writing skills.

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