1 Analytical review

Writing as one of the main and productive skills and a significant requirement for English as a foreign language learners is regarded to be one of the most important communicative skills in English language learning. Writing’s significance in learning language has been acknowledged by many researchers and educators. While most people have no difficulty in being proficient in other language skills in their native languages, becoming a skilled writer even in the mother tongue is quite challenging; let alone becoming a competent writer in second or foreign language. Based on these points, English language teaching circles are paying further attention to writing skill.

Writing is often considered as the most difficult skill to be mastered because of its complexity.

Researchers in the area of second/foreign language learning are now in agreement that L2 proficiency, in general, and writing proficiency, in particular, are multi-componential in nature, and that their principal dimensions can be adequately, and comprehensively, captured by the notions of complexity, accuracy and fluency.

According to P. Skehan, complexity is “the stage and elaboration of the underlying inter language system”, which utilizes complicated and structured inter-language. Writing accuracy refers to “the extent to which the language produced conforms to the target language norms” [4].

P. Skehan also defines accuracy as a characteristic concerning “a learner’s capacity to handle whatever level of inter-language complexity s/he has currently attained”; that is, how similar produced language is to the target language. Finally, fluency is defined as "the number of words produced in a specified time frame, together with lexical Infrequency, irrespective of spelling and content, provided that the writer’s meaning is readily understandable”.

P. Skehan and P. Foster define writing complexity as, “Learners’ capacity to use more elaborate and complex target like language”.

One of the first to use this dichotomy was C. Brumfit who distinguished between fluency-oriented activities, which foster spontaneous oral L2 production, and accuracy-oriented activities, which focus on linguistic form and on the controlled production of grammatically correct linguistic structures in the L2 [8].

The third component, complexity, was added in the 1990s, following Skehan who proposed an L2 model which for the first time included CAF as the three principal proficiency dimensions.

The quality of writing is not simply restricted to the learning of linguistic items and gaining mastery over different dimensions of performance. In essence, the way people produce language in both oral and written forms may have been affected by different factors highlights the importance of studying factors such as personality types, self-regulation, self-esteem, and creativity which are considered as individual differences that have great effect on language learning, especially writing. n terms of language learning, writing is probably the most difficult skill to acquire. It is something most native speakers never master and is more challenging for second language learners.

According to Lenneberg, writing is like swimming. He further adds that Hyland claims that nowadays, the teaching of writing occupies a much further essential situation in the field of second or foreign language teaching rather than two or three decades ago. He states that it is related to the dependence of network communication on writing skill. [7].

Writing is a recursive process and learners should revise their writing several times before submitting final drafts.

According to Richards and Renandya the skills involved in writing are highly complex. Second language writers have to pay attention to higher level skills of planning and organizing as well as lower level skills of spelling, punctuation, word choice, and so on. [8].

Despite the importance of English as an international language, writing in English as a foreign language has not received much attention in the way it is taught and learned in Iran. Students need to be competent in certain areas of language and its skills to be able to cope with academic demands of their courses. Even though writing is one of the most important tools in expressing new ideas and concepts, it has been marginalized in the Iranian educational curriculum which might be due to the traditional methods of teaching this skill in educational contexts.

The focus of teaching writing has moved in recent years from the finished product to the process of writing. The name of the approach reveals its main principle, putting emphasis on writing as a process. The goal of the model is to improve writing by providing the learner with opportunities to master a range of behaviors related with effective composition. Learners try to internalize the practices utilized by good writers in order to write effective composition.

Learning to write is difficult especially for those writing in a second or a foreign language in academic contexts since they do not have enough knowledge about how to generate accurate and grammatically correct essays. As grammatical correctness of writing is considered to be a problem for EFL learners, a need is felt to improve the accuracy of students' writing performance. Accuracy refers to the absence of errors.

A. S. Hapsari argues that writing is generally known as the most difficult of the four skills. The difficulty is seen in generating and organizing ideas and the mastery of the different aspects of writing such as grammar, spelling, word choice, punctuation, and so on [12].

Conejo refers to a blog as a website where regular updating takes place. The posting of various entries is arranged in chronological order, usually published from the latest to the oldest. Blogs may share a specific theme and their content can be collected and posted by one or more authors. They are also used to organize links to other webpages which may host videos and podcasts. Blogs generally include the option of allowing members and visitors to comment on the posts, thus promoting the interaction between users without the need to open discussion forums or threads.

Bello indicated that writing, as a productive language skill, plays an essential role in promoting language acquisition as learners experiment with words, sentences, and large chunks of writing to communicate their ideas effectively and to reinforce the grammar and vocabulary they learn in class. He added that “one of the major failing in the traditional curriculum could be attributed to lack of attention given to writing, which is an important avenue for thinking”.

As for writing in EFL, French and Rhoder stated that writing could be viewed as the main area in the curriculum that we associate with creativity, noting that writing is one of the most tasks that we can be asked to perform. Thus, improving students' essay writing is believed to be one of the most important skills which EFL learners need to develop throughout their schooling. During their schooling, EFL learners need to develop some writing skills such as: the ability to write complete and meaningful sentences, coherent, clear and well- organized ideas, use communicative language, choose suitable words and idioms and use writing mechanics appropriately.

Darayseh noted that teaching writing no longer means simply having students do grammar exercises in writing or getting writing which is free from grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes, instead, we are after writing about what students are interested in and what they really want to communicate to the reader, and how they reach their final writing products. In spite of the importance of the activities included in the various writing stages, many teachers give little or even no attention to such stages.

Colantone cited that many EFL teachers follow the traditional method in teaching composition concentrating on the final product rather than on the process of writing. "In writing classes, teachers emphasize mechanics, spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, width of margins, and so on, with little attention to development or style. In addition, the stages of writing: pre-writing, while writing, and post-writing are expected to contribute to strengthening students’ thinking skills because they engage them in processes such as connecting, analyzing and evaluating ideas, a fact that leads to sharpening students thinking skills.

With regard to means to help learners generate ideas, Manktelow highlighted some strategies that could be followed to develop students' creativity such as: problem solving, attribute listing, morphological analysis, brainstorming, and checklists. Thus, the current study comes as an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of using the brainstorming technique in developing first secondary grade students' essay writing skills in EFL.