چکیده:
The present study investigated the impact of concept mapping as a prewriting activity on EFL learners' writing ability in terms of product and process of writing tasks. Twenty female students at the upper intermediate level were randomly assigned into two equal groups. The first group, serving as a control group, was not instructed to use concept mapping during prewriting phase, while the second group used concept maps in preparation for writing tasks, The results of pretests and posttests of the two groups scored by two raters based on predetermined criteria were compared. Concept mapping was shown to enhance the learners' writing ability. In order to capture the quality of this enhancement, the study used comparison and analysis of writing assignments written every two sessions, along with students' interviews. The results indicated the improvement of students' writing ability in terms of quantity and quality of generating, organizing, and associating ideas. The findings of the present study also suggest that concept mapping can be effective for affective, as well as cognitive instructional objectives
خلاصه ماشینی:
Researchers have also found that concept map should be recommended not only as a means of producing meaningful learning with the potential of enhancing and assessing conceptual understanding, but also as an effective tool to bridge the gap between conceptual and procedural knowledge (Khan, 1993).
So a more comprehensive study on the effect of concept mapping on writing is required to capture the process underlying writing different types of assignments in the foreign language, and to evaluate the strategies by which this skill can be progressively mastered by a product oriented approach.
Discussion This study investigated the role of concept mapping as a facilitative tool to help EFL learners organize and generate ideas when preparing to write.
This is in line with previous studies 118 On the Impact of Concept Mapping as a Prewriting (Okebukola & Atkinson, 1992; Buzan, 1995; Dabbagh, 2001) that concept mapping serves as a cognitive tool that organizes and fosters students' thinking and reasoning skills, and develops their problem solving and idea generation capabilities.
While expertise in writing involves more than the aforementioned factors such as high quality and quantity of idea generation and association, it was not feasible within the scope of this research to examine the impact of concept mapping on some other specifications of advanced and proficient writing, such as containing critical and creative thinking.