Argumentative writing

Due to the potent role of critical thinking in learners’ academic success and its connection with factors conducive to learning such as argumentation ability, the present study seeks to primarily probe the correlation between Iranian EFL learners’ critical thinking ability and their argumentative writing achievement, and investigate the predictability of the students’ argumentative writing achievement based on their scores on critical thinking scale. Furthermore, the effect of gender on Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement was investigated. In so doing, 'Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal' (2002) as well as an argumentative writing assignment was employed, and the participants of the study included 178 EFL learners in three universities in Mashhad, Iran. Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) was utilized to analyze the data. The results substantiated the positive correlation between critical thinking ability and argumentative writing revealing that these two variables significantly and positively related to each other; among the predictors (subscales of the critical thinking) of argumentative writing, inference, assumptions, arguments were the stronger predictors. Finally, gender was not found to significantly affect Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement. The conclusions and implications of this study are pointed out with reference to foreign language teaching context.

The field of ELT is constantly witnessing the introduction of new instructional approaches: one such perhaps recent initiative is critical discourse analysis (CDA). Accordingly, the present study was an attempt to investigate the impact of CDA instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ descriptive and argumentative writing ability. To fulfill the aforementioned purpose, a sample TOEFL was primarily piloted among a group of 30 upper intermediate EFL learners by the researchers; with the acceptable reliability and item analysis indices achieved, then the researchers administered the test among another group of 90 upper intermediate learners. Ultimately, those 60 learners whose scores fell one standard deviation above and below the mean were chosen as the participants of the study and were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group with 30 participants in each. Both of these groups underwent the same amount of teaching time during 20 sessions which included a treatment of CDA instruction based on Jank’s (2005) set of 14 features for the experimental group. A posttest was administered at the end of the instruction to both groups and their mean scores on the test were compared through a multivariate analysis of variance. The result (F = 14.41 and p = 0.000 < 0.05) led to the rejection of the two null hypotheses raised in this study, thereby demonstrating that the learners in the experimental group benefited significantly more than those in the control group in terms of improving their descriptive and argumentative writing ability. Hence, the major pedagogical implication of this study is that CDA instruction can be effectively used to assist EFL learners improve their argumentative and descriptive writing ability.

Although scientific forum has obliged its members to hide their presence particularly while they are discussing research outcomes to avoid personal biases, a recent trend is encouraging writers to demonstrate their identity as the author of the text through the use of first person pronouns in order to take responsibility for the content. Therefore, the present study focuses on intermediate and advanced EFL learners‘ adoption of first person pronouns so as to manifest their identity in argumentative and narrative writings. A total of 30 EFL intermediate and advanced students attending an IELTS preparation course were requested to write essays on narrative and argumentative topics. The comparison between their uses of self-mention pronouns revealed that there was not a significant difference between the use of first person pronouns which are adopted by advanced and intermediate learners in the use of pronouns in both modes of writing (argumentative and narrative essays). Moreover, by tallying first person pronouns, it is shown that advanced learners have exploited first person pronouns less than intermediate learners within narrative writings. In addition, it was found that learners used more first person pronouns in narrative writings than in argumentative ones. Findings imply that since argumentative writing requires logical reasoning, learners prefer to be cautious about the adoption of first person pronouns and revealing their presence to show their credible self. English language teachers are suggested to make language learners aware of the uses of self-mention pronouns while practicing different writing modes. Since the overuse of the personal pronouns as well as the absolute absence of the mentioned pronouns is not recommended in writing, explicit instruction concerning the use of self-mention in witting is recommended.

Essay genres are often employed to assess learning at higher education. Students are sometimes required to write essay in examinations and assignments. The expectations of assessors in writing essays are students’ ability to present analytical and reasoned arguments and to engage with alternative viewpoints. In fact, in evaluating essays, assessors consider the extent to which a student is able to meet these expectations. However, students may have challenges meeting these expectations and instructors, particularly instructors in the discipline, may not be prepared to provide students with an explicit linguistic description of how these expectations are met. Thus, this study draws from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to scaffold students’ challenges in meeting the expectations of essay genre. In fact, it uses Dreyfus et al’s (2010) 3 x 3 linguistic toolkit to analyze essays written by postgraduate students in the department of English at one university in India. The 3 x 3 linguistic toolkit is used to zoom in student’s challenges in controlling the resources of SFL’s three metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) at the level of whole text, paragraph, and sentence. After the analysis, the findings revealed that students face challenges controlling the resources of the three modes of meaning at all levels. These challenges include difficulties in grammar, lexical choices, punctuation, following expected organization, answering the question, the use of signposts to create a coherent text, and the use of engagement resources to develop a consistent argument. This study has implications for teaching and assessing academic writing.

Academic writing is not just about presenting a set of ideas, but through the act of writing, the authors position themselves as individuals having particular identities which mostly reflect the dominant sociocultural values and practices of the discourse communities in which they are living and performing. The present study, using a mixed method approach, attempted to explore the evidences of voice and subject positioning, as reflections of authorial identity, in the argumentative writings of 41 advanced Iranian EFL learners. At first, the relationship between voice intensity and overall writing quality of the participants was assessed and the results indicated a positive relationship between the constructs. The multiple regression analysis conducted also revealed that assertiveness, as one of the main subcomponents of voice in writing, had the highest level of contribution in accounting for the writing competence of the learners. Afterwards, some representative instances of subject-positioning (i.e., ideational, interpersonal and textual) in the written texts were identified and discussed based on the ideological context of the study since it is believed that authorial identity and voice can vividly reflect the overall ideology of the specific discourse community in which they are constructed. Finally, it was suggested that raising the awareness of learners and even instructing them about the significance of authorial identity, voice and subject-positioning in writing can assist them in constructing more authentic texts in terms of idea presentation, consideration of readers and specific textual and linguistic features used.

The present study attempted to probe into the effects of four planning time conditions (pre-task, extended task, free writing, and control) over the frequency of employing metacognitive strategies in argumentative and expository writings of 108 participants. Employing an experimental writing task design under four planning time conditions and implementing a retrospective questionnaire, both qualitative and quantitative approaches were adopted. Through implementing the retrospective questionnaire, an 8-point Likert-type scale was used and the associated statistical procedures were employed. The results showed that the frequency of the use of Generation of Ideas strategy was significantly higher in the argumentative writings than in the expository writings. The use of Elaboration of Ideas strategy was significantly different from Thinking about Language Aspects strategy and Thinking about the Essay Structure strategy and it was the lowest. The highest strategy use belonged to ‘Thinking about Language Aspects strategy’, followed by Thinking about the Essay Structure, Generation of Ideas, Organization of Ideas and Elaboration of Ideas strategies respectively. The use of ‘Thinking about Language Aspects strategy’ in the extended task condition was different from the other groups, and it was the lowest. In ‘Thinking about Language Aspects strategy’ use no significant differences were observed among argumentative and expository writings. The study can help broaden the understanding of EFL writers’ metacognitive writing processes involving planning and, the results may have pedagogical implications for EFL writing instructors and theoretical implications for EFL writing researchers.

علیرغم اینکه که مطالعات چشمگیری در زمینه تجزیه و تحلیل صدا و حضور نویسنده در نگارش های استدلالی انجام گردیده، هنوز در خصوص تأثیر آموزش بر این حضور تحقیقات کافی صورت نپذیرفته است. بنابراین ، مطالعه حاضر به بررسی تأثیر آموزش مبتنی بر مدل مارتین و وایت و الگوی تعاملی هایلند در شکل گیری صدا و حضور نویسنده و تعامل بین نویسنده و خواننده پرداخته است. برای این منظور، یک گروه کنترل و دو گروه تحقیق در مطالعه شرکت کردند. گروه های تحقیق در مورد عناصر تشکیل دهنده موضع نویسنده و تعامل با خواننده بر اساس دو مدل متفاوت آموزش داده شدند. تغییرات در استفاده از عناصر بین گروههای تحقیق و کنترل پس از آموزش بررسی گردید. زبان آموزانی که از تأثیر صدا و حضور نویسنده بر اساس مدل مارتین و وایت آگاه گردیدند، از موضع گیری تعاملی و تدافعی بیشتری در نگارش آیلتس استفاده کردند و تعامل قابل تو جهی با خواننده داشتند. نتایج حاصل از این تحقیق می تواند به مربیان کمک کند تا آگاهی زبان آموزان را از چگونگی حضور نویسنده در نوشتار بطور موثری ارتقا داده تا نوشتار های تعاملی متقاعده کننده ای را ارائه دهند.

Although there is a large body of literature on the use of connectors by EFL learners in argumentative writing, African language learner groups are not represented and most studies have adopted a cross-sectional approach. This paper seeks to analyze how frequently connectors are used on the basis of pseudo-longitudinal data from first, second, and third-year undergraduate students from the Institute for Applied Pedagogy, University of Burundi. The study adopted the corpus linguistic and quantitative approaches. The data were collected through 2 writing assignments given to students in 2019. In total, 622 essays, amounting to 306,664-word tokens, were collected. Data preparation followed three steps, namely, typing the handwritten essays, preparing the TXT files, and metadata for the corpus. The latter was searched using AntConc tool, on the basis of a comprehensive list of 95 connectors, classified into 6 categories. The tool availed frequency information, that is, how often each connector occurs in the corpus. Percentages were computed using XLS facility and are presented in tables and graphs. Results indicate that 19 connectors were frequently used by learners, the most frequent ones being those which add information followed by those expressing a result relationship. However, connectors expressing transition and summation were found to be rarely used in the corpus. Another discovery is that learners in all three years of study seem to have the same preferences in terms of connectors. Furthermore, cases of misuse such as wrong combinations and incorrect spelling, semantic, stylistic and syntactic errors were observed at all levels. The findings of this study can be useful to learners, teachers, and material designers.

Previous research has shown the differential effects of task-related prompts on syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity when L2 learners use writing prompts to produce a piece of writing. However, the extent to which the freedom in the selection of prompts affects these linguistic facets in L2 argumentative essays is still unknown. The present study, therefore, was designed to investigate differences between syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity in argumentative essays. Seventy-one upper-intermediate male and female Iranian English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners from Imam Khomeini International University in Qazvin and Safir Plus institute in Tehran participated in this study. Five-paragraph essays were used to collect data, and SPSS (version 25) was used to analyze the data. Results of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed statistically significant differences between syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity. Results from post-hoc analyses revealed statistically significant differences between lexical diversity and grammatical accuracy as well as lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, but no statistically significant differences were found between grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity in argumentative essays.

lexical diversity of argumentative and narrative writings of L2 learners, and the contribution of syntactic complexity and lexical diversity to the writing quality in the L2 argumentative and narrative writings of EFL learners. To this end, 46 pre-intermediate and intermediate Iranian EFL learners from four intact classes wrote one argumentative and one narrative essay in L2, and one argumentative and one narrative essay in L1 on different topics. Paired-samples t-tests revealed that lexical diversity surfaced more in the L1 writing of the learners. Multiple linear regressions indicated that among five measures of syntactic complexity, mean length of T-unit and clauses per T-unit better predict the quality of argumentative writing. In addition, complex nominals per clause are better predictors of narrative writing quality. Simple linear regressions showed that lexical diversity is a significant predictor of L2 writing in both genres. Based on the findings, writing instructors are advised to provide L2 learners with explicit instruction on the use of diverse vocabulary and different syntactic structures in order to help them improve the quality of their writing.