Teaching Argumentative Writing to International Students through the Self-Regulated Strategy Development Model

Although international students often attain a certain level of competence in everyday language following preparatory education in a foreign or second language, their proficiency in academic language may remain limited. One of the primary concerns of Turkish higher education—which currently hosts more than 300,000 international students—is the academic success of these students. A key factor influencing this success is their academic language proficiency. Academic performance is closely linked to students’ competence in writing, highlighting the pressing need for international students to develop their academic writing skills. Academic writing is a genre with specific conventions and practices, and its practical implementation is strongly tied to the ability to compose argumentative texts. Academic writing often involves expressing viewpoints and counterarguments—core elements of argumentative writing competence. In this context, the present study investigated the effectiveness of the SRSD model in teaching argumentative writing, a critical subskill in academic literacy. The study was conducted with 39 students at the C1 proficiency level in Turkish as a foreign language. Using a quasi-experimental design, the experimental group received six weeks of argumentative writing instruction based on the SRSD model. The findings revealed that the SRSD model effectively improved students’ argumentative writing skills. The data collected before and after the intervention indicate that students in the experimental group used key argumentative text components—such as topic, claim, justification, counterclaim, counterarguments, rebuttal, and conclusion—more functionally and with greater structural coherence. These results suggest that structured strategy-based instructional approaches can significantly enhance the written expression skills of Turkish learners as a second or foreign language.