The purpose of this study is to find a practical solution for improving writing skill among Iranian high school learners of EFL. The main question was whether pragmatics had any priority over traditional methods in improving writing or not.  Forty high school students were selected on the basis of their performance in PET (2009). In addition the following instruments were also used in this quas...

in assessing foreign language writing, holistic and analytic scoring can be used to measure a variety of discourse and linguistic features. this study aimed to investigate the possible significant effect of analyt- ic and holistic assessments on improving writing skill among iranian efl learners. for this purpose, two groups of intermediate efl learners, after being homogenized, were divided in...

this study investigated 1) whether the effect of teacher-developed graphic organizers vis-à-vis student-developed ones was more significant on improving intermediate efl learners’ writing, and 2)whether the use of both graphic organizers had any impact on their writing. the participants were selectedin two stages: 130 students sat for a piloted proficiency test. those who scored above half ofth...

EFL learners who loved to read newspapers but have difficulty in comprehending. Present paper is a study on the significance of special styles of newspapers’ writing that may contribute in decreasing reading and comprehension skills for EFL learners and also is primarily concerned with the language and style of newspaper reportage. Skilled readers don’t just read, they interact with the text. T...

Although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in L2 writing research. The small number of previous studies (e.g., Li, 2007; Brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on differ...

Although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in L2 writing research. The small number of previous studies (e.g., Li, 2007; Brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on differ...

Writing is a complex task that requires the integration of multiple cognitive, linguistic, and motor abilities. Until now, only a few studies investigated writing abilities in individuals with Intellectual Disability (ID). The aim of the present exploratory study was to provide knowledge on the organization of writing in two populations with ID, Down syndrome (DS) and Williams syndrome (WS), tr...

The longitudinal effects of repeating a timed classroom writing activity on the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) student’s L2 (second language) writing development were investigated. Data for 46 students were collected 30 times over one year. The students’ compositions were analyzed for fluency and for grammatical and lexical complexity. Text analysis using Coh Metrix and visual analysis of ...