The Importance of Prewriting Strategies in the Students’ Writing Production

Preparation for writing is an indispensable step that determines students’ success in writing. The present research is fundamentally centered on the prewriting strategies in the students’ writing production. It is an attempt to know whether the students of the English Department, College of Languages at Duhok University apply prewriting strategies or not. Furthermore, they aim to uncover the preparatory strategies, processes and mental techniques that students apply before writing. For the Methodology section, the data were collected via a questionnaire among second-stage students of the English Department. The questionnaire was composed of ten questions covering different aspects of prewriting strategies. The participants consisted of 15 male and female sophomore students. The outcomes of the questionnaire turned out as the following: only 26% of the students said that they always apply prewriting strategies, while 66% said they sometimes apply prewriting strategies, and only 8% of the students said they never apply prewriting strategies prior to writing. The data collection asserted that the majority of the second-stage students of the English department do not use prewriting strategies frequently and the causes are further presented and explained according to the data collection.