Scaffolding persuasive writing in French as a Foreign Language: Cognitive Strategy Instruction for university writers in Egypt

Abstract Persuasive writing in French as a Foreign Language (FFL) is cognitively demanding because writers must coordinate argument generation, organization, audience awareness, and linguistic encoding, while Arabic L1 writers may also need to recalibrate rhetorical expectations when moving from Arabic essay practices to French persuasive conventions. This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study examined whether explicit Cognitive Strategy Instruction (CSI) embedded in a year-long university writing course in Egypt could scaffold FFL student writers ( N = 30; CEFR B1–B1+). Students completed parallel timed persuasive-writing tasks before and after the intervention. Scripts were scored with an analytic 4-domain rubric (Claim & Evidence; Structure & Coherence; Persuasive Language; Grammatical Accuracy/Syntactic Complexity) by two independent raters (ICC acceptable to good across domains). Paired-samples t-tests showed significant gains in the three targeted argumentative domains with large effects (dzs ≥ 4.18), alongside a smaller but significant improvement in grammatical accuracy (dz = 0.47). Classroom observations and post-intervention interviews indicated that CSI tools made planning and structuring procedures more explicit, reduced uncertainty, and shifted revision attention from sentence-level correctness toward reader-oriented rhetorical choices, while some learners initially experienced strategy uptake as cognitively heavy. Overall, CSI appears promising for scaffolding persuasive writing in FFL in Arabic-speaking higher education, while the single-group design calls for replication with comparison groups.