Raising EFL Learners' Pragmatic Awareness of Intercultural Rhetoric in Writing

The purpose of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of raising Iranian learners’ pragmatic awareness of intercultural rhetoric in enhancing their L2 writing ability, complexity, and accuracy. To this end, two 25-member groups of EFL learners who were taking Basic Writing course at Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch, were selected based on their performance on a language proficiency test (PET). They were assigned as one control and one experimental group and took a validated, researcher-made pretest/posttest (with the reliability of 0.73) at the outset of the study. The experimental group received the explicit instruction of the teacher on IR followed by a task related to the content of the instruction while the control group’s practice in writing was limited to doing the exercises in their course book without receiving the explicit instruction on IR.Following the termination of the nine-session treatment, the posttest was administered and the collected data underwent data analysis. The results indicated that pragmatic awareness of IR in writing was significantly effective in improving the Iranian EFL learners' writing ability as well as the accuracy of their written output. However, no significant influence of rhetorical awareness raising on learners’ writing complexity was investigated in this study.