The Effect of Explicit Instruction of Genre on the Argumentative Essay Writing Performance of Iranian Female EFL Learners

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit instruction of genre on the argumentative essay writing performance of Iranian female EFL learners. Initially, a TOEFL proficiency test was administered at the beginning of the course and the participants whose scores fell under the normal curve were chosen. Then, a writing pretest was given to ensure that that they were homogenous in terms of overall argumentative essay writing performance. To this aim, sixty participants were selected and divided into two groups consisting of 30 learners each. During 10 sessions, the control group was taught how to write effectively, drawing on some essay writing tasks. The teacher provided the learners with the general guidelines for writing such as jumbled sentences as well as jumbled paragraphs different model essay texts such as sports, healthy life, entertainments and so on. On the other hand, in the experimental group in addition to the aforesaid procedure for the control group, 30 minutes of each class was devoted to genre-based instruction of writing argumentative essays in 10 sessions. To this end, the learners were introduced to the functions and components of argumentative essay genre and its moves were presented and then practiced during the treatment period. At the end, a writing posttest was given to the learners concerning argumentative writing performance. The results of the independent samples T-test indicated that explicit teaching of genre significantly improved the argumentative essay writing performance of Iranian intermediate EFL learners.