Abstract:
The purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of
building formal schemata on the improvement of Iranian EFL
learners' writing performance. In so doing, the researchers
selected two groups of upper-intermediate students at Islamic
Azad University, Roodehen Branch, from two intact classes.
One class served as the control class and one as the
experimental class. In order to assess their general language
proficiency, and also to ensure their homogeneity, Nelson
English Language Test (Flower and Cow, 1976) was
administered. Furthermore, at the beginning of the treatment,
the participants of both groups were asked to write an essay as
the writing pretest. Then, the experimental group received the
treatment which was training on rhetorical organization to
build formal schemata. However, the control group received
the conventional instruction of the course. After 14 sessions of
treatment, both groups were asked to write an essay as the
writing posttest. Two raters rated the papers of the groups,
using Hyland's (2003) rating scale. After estimating the interrater
reliability of the scores, an independent t-test was used to
compare the mean scores of the experimental and control
groups. The results clearly indicated that there was a
significant difference between the mean scores of the groups
on the posttest of writing (t= 4.46, df= 45, p< 0.05). In other
words, the experimental group (M= 13.86) outperformed the
control group (M = 9.80) on the posttest of writing. Therefore,
it can be concluded that the treatment offered by the
researchers, that is, building formal schemata, had a
statistically significant effect on the improvement of the
writing performance of the experimental group