The Impact of Webquest on Improving English Writing Skills in Preparatory Public Schools in Qatar

Despite the tremendous efforts that have been exerted in Qatar to improve the teaching of EFL writing, EFL teachers still fail to deliver adequately, and the learners’ writing proficiency remains below expectations. This study is an attempt to investigate the impact of WebQuest on improving grade nine EFL students’ writing skills to inform teachers and policy makers for future intervention and improvement. The data is from 25 male students who study at a preparatory school in Qatar. They were selected based on opportunistic convenience sampling strategy (Duff 2008). The participants took a pre-test and a posttest about writing a descriptive paragraph. Analysis of the data found that WebQuest has made some improvement in students’ performance in writing in terms of overall scores. Moreover, a significant increase in students’ achievement in writing aspects (content, organization, sentence fluency, word choice and grammar and mechanics) was recorded after being taught writing using WebQuest.

Keywords: Writing; Web Quest; Web Page; Digital Resources; Writing Aspects; EFL; Teaching; Inquiry Joint Writing.