Abstract:
The purpose of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of raising Iranian learners’ pragmatic awareness of intercultural rhetoric in enhancing their L2 writing ability, as well as their written complexity and accuracy. To this end, two 25-member groups of EFL learners who were taking Basic Writing course at Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch, were selected based on their performance on a language proficiency test (PET). They were assigned as one control and one experimental group and received a validated, researcher-made pretest/posttest (with the reliability of 0.73) at the outset of the study. The experimental group received the explicit instruction of the teacher on IR followed by a task related to the content of the instruction while the control group’s practice in writing was limited to doing the exercises in their course book without receiving the explicit instruction of IR. Following the termination of the nine-session treatment, the posttest was administered and the collected data underwent data analysis. The results indicated that pragmatic awareness of IR in writing was significantly effective in improving the Iranian EFL learners' writing ability as well as the accuracy of their written output. However, no significant influence of rhetorical awareness raising in learners’ writing complexity was investigated in this study.
Machine summary:
ir The purpose of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of raising Iranian learners’ pragmatic awareness of intercultural rhetoric in enhancing their L2 writing ability, complexity, and accuracy.
In a plain way, learning the rules of composition in a globalized community is related, to a certain extent, to learning the rhetorical conventions of writing across languages, and this need requires L2 learners to learn the rhetorical organization of the English written text (Marandi, 2002; Shen & Yao, 1999), no matter to which cultural community they belong.
Although research in contrastive rhetoric has proven effective in establishing correlations between culture and writing, its practical uses for ESL/EFL teachers are not exactly clear (Leki, 1991), and its "applications to classroom instruction have not developed correspondingly" (Raimes, 1991, p.
2 Research question two To answer the second research question " Does raising EFL learners' pragmatic awareness of IR in writing have any statistically significant effect on the complexity of their written output?" an independent samples T-test was run to compare the mean scores of the study groups in terms of the complexity of their written output on section B of the posttest (writing a 130-word essay).
3 Research question three Another independent samples t-test was run to provide an appropriate answer for RQ3 "Does raising EFL learners' pragmatic awareness of IR in writing have any statistically significant effect on the accuracy of their written output?" The results of the T-test represented by below Table demonstrates that there is statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the control and experimental groups (p=.