Enhancing Freshman Students’ Writing Skills with a Mind- Mapping Software

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in their first writing course in EFL, participated in the study. Before instruction, no significant differences were found between both groups in their writing ability. Both groups were exposed to the same in-class writing instruction. Since students have difficulty generating ideas in EFL, writing paragraphs with topic sentences and supporting details, a mind-mapping software was used to help students brain-storm, generate ideas, relate main ideas and supporting details. The mind-mapping software uses lines, colors, arrows, branches to show connections between the ideas generated on the mind map. Every week the software was used to create mind maps for the essays they had to write. Post-test results showed that experimental students who used the mind-mapping software, made higher gains in writing.