Employing an explanatory sequential design, this study investigated the effects of a blog-mediated writing course on L2 students’ writing motivation, self-efficacy, and self-regulation. A number of 46 Iranian EFL learners from 2 intact university classes were recruited as the participants and were randomly assigned into the control group (n = 21) and the experimental group (n ...

Paraphrasing is an important aspect of language competence; however, EFL learners have long had difficulty paraphrasing in their writing owing to their limited language proficiency. Therefore, automatic paraphrase suggestion systems can be useful for writers. In this paper, we present PREFER 1 , a paraphrase reference tool for helping language learners improve their writing skills. In this pape...

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in their first writing course in EFL, participated in the study. Before instruction, no significant differences were found between both groups in their writing ability. Both groups were exposed to the same in-class writing instruction. Since students have difficulty generating ideas in EFL, writing paragraphs with topic sentences and supporting details,...

This study aimed at investigating the difference of integrated writing task of the TOFEL iBT candidates in comparison with independent writing task on Iranian EFL learners writing performance. The initial population for the study was 50 junior EFL students. To get more homogeneity, participants were selected among those who were studying in the third year of university in EFL major. They were m...

abstract the present study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between efl learners’ anxiety and writing complexity. for the purpose of the study, 70 female learners, between 17 and 24 years old (mean=20) from najm language school in tehran participated in the study. the participants’ level of anxiety was measured using horwitz, horwitz, and cope’s anxiety questionnaire (1986) and th...

Writing and speaking are the productive skills of a language and share similar components. However, there has been little attempt to investigate the impact of writing practice on the speaking proficiency of the learners. The present study using a pretest-posttest controlled group design in a quasi-experimental approach investigated the effect of guided writing practice on the speaking proficien...

The difficulty of assessing the writing skill is well known. Different testing facets seem to affect the result of assessing the writing skill. In addition to the writer’s ability, the topic of the writing task, and methods of rating may contribute to the writer’s score. In this study, 50 EFL learners wrote four different types of writing tasks (convincing, describing, instructing, and explaini...

Critical literacy is widely practiced in classrooms in many countries and across levels of education. Research that explores critical literacy in English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms, however, remains scarce. The few studies that do exist focus on development of critical literacy without explicit attention to development of language skills (see, ...

Abstract In Iran, most English teachers’ method of teaching writing is merely to have students do some writing exercises or simply to give them writing tests without any instruction, but writing is not an easy task for students, and teachers should be able to do more to facilitate their students’ writing. One of the ways to aid writing is dynamic assessment via graduated prompt. The graduated p...

The present study compared the effect of cooperative group feedback and cooperative group writing techniques in writing classes. Accordingly, 90 male and female intermediate English language learners sat for a sample piloted Preliminary English Test and 60 who scored one standard deviation above and below the mean were selected as the main participants. Both groups were taught the same course b...