During the interview at the prewriting stage, I found that all the students had little
confidence in writing. They were unsure of their ability to write more than three
sentences or one paragraph. Such psychological suffering seems unavoidable for the
students when they were required to write in a new language. Additionally, the
students' language competence was just at either low intermediate or high
intermediate level. They had limited vocabulary and sentence structures that were
believed to serve as foundation for writing. When asked if assigned free writing on
given topics were acceptable tasks, all of them admitted that it would require painful
efforts to write with limited language competence and to express themselves clearly
with the 'blank' mind. They said, "I can't think of anything to write.