Implications of Design Thinking in an EFL Classroom: Writing in Context

Writing has been considered as one of the most creative discrete skills teaching and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) practitioners always regard it as a challenge. Many scholars explored EFL students’ writing problems through qualitative and quantitative studies and offered suggestions and recommendations to address the issues. However, they reserved their conclusions with a revisit on the efficacy of the desired results. This research, in a one group pre/post quasi experimental research context, suggests design thinking’s five-step strategy: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test, a relatively less experimented approach, to enhance EFL students’ writing performance with special emphasis on Capitalization, Punctuation, Spelling, Word-order, Tense, and Sentence-structure. The study sample consisted of 25 preparatory year students at Najran University who were taught paragraph writing using a five-step strategy based on the design thinking. The pre/post tests were conducted by the researchers to assess students’ writing performance before and after the experiment. Dependent samples t-test produced a significant difference in the results in favor of the post test. It is concluded that the design thinking’s five-step strategy had dramatically enhanced EFL student’ writing performance. Implications through further studies of design thinking are proposed to address other EFL teaching and learning issues.