چکیده:
The ability to write effectively is becoming progressively important andinstruction in writing is assuming an increasing role in second and foreign language education. Students’ writing abilities have been tested through various writing tasks. Independent tasks of writing or writing-only tasks have been utilized to test students’ writing ability; however, they have been criticized for their lack of authenticity and validity and integrated tasks of writing have been proposed as an alternative. In this regard, this study attempted to examine the impacts of reading-to-write and writing-only tasks on the writing ability of Iranian EFL learners. The main participants of the study were 68 intermediate-level EFL learners divided into two homogeneous groups: experimental and control. After the writing pretest, the experimental group was given reading-to-write tasks for 15 sessions, while the control group was provided with writing-only tasks. Eventually, a writing posttest was administered. The statistical analyses of the collected data revealed a statistically significant difference between the writing ability of the participants of the two groups. To be precise, reading-to-write tasks were found to be more effective than writing-only tasks. The data collected via the reading-to-write questionnaire was likewise analyzed with the results showing a unanimous preference for reading-to-write tasks.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"g. Tsang, 1996; Hirvela, 2004); studies that investigate correlations between reading and writing (Tierney & Pearson, 1983; Olson, 2003), and studies that look into different perspectives on the reading- writing relationship or explain its theoretical bases (McCarthy, 2001; Esmaeili, 2002; Grabe, 2004).
This study, therefore, attempted to examine the impacts of reading-to- write and writing-only tasks on the writing ability of adult female intermediate-level EFL learners; hence, the following research question was formulated: 1.
Eventually, the participants in the experimental group were given a reading-to-write questionnaire to reflect on the process of performing these tasks.
Prior to writing the one-paragraph texts, the students in the experimental group were asked to read the passages given by the teacher.
Discussion In general, the obtained results in the quantitative phase of the study indicated that reading-to-write tasks had a better impact on the writing ability of Iranian intermediate-level EFL learners than writing-only tasks.
As for the qualitative phase of the study, it should be added that the participants’ responses to the items of the reading-to-write questionnaire illustrated that they preferred reading-to-write tasks to writing-only tasks given that the reading passages supplied them with relevant words, additional ideas, and confirmatory examples about the topics on which they were asked to write.
Furthermore, requiring students to make use of the vocabulary items embedded in the passages can give an opportunity to EFL teachers to teach some new words to the students; in other words, they can utilize the writing task as a means to broaden the students’ knowledge of vocabulary."