The Impact of Summary Writing with Structure Guidelines on EFL College Students’ Rhetorical Organization: Integrating Genre-Based and Process Approaches

Abstract

This study aimed at investigating the impact of writing on Iranian EFL college students’ rhetorical organization. Thirty Iranian female undergraduate students majoring in English at Al-zahra University participated in the current study. The writing instructions included two stages, each lasting for four weeks. The participants were assigned to a control group and an experimental group according to an “S” model and received writing instructions based on genre and process approaches. The experimental group received writing instruction on text structure designed according to descriptive genre for the first four weeks, followed by the instruction on the process approach for the second four weeks. However, the control group received the process writing instruction only during the second stage. The research questions focused on whether summary writing with instructions on text structure improves students’ rhetorical organization or not. Also, the study sought to find out how students’ rhetorical organization improves when instructions on text structure are used as a supplementary tool to the process approach. The design of the study was quasi experimental. The findings revealed that summary writing with instructions on text structure helps students have better performances in rhetorical organization, concerning content, organization, language use, and syntactic complexity. Also, the obtained results indicated that genre and process approaches can be complementary, and summary writing with instructions on text structure can be used as a supplementary tool to the process approach.

Keywords

• summary writing
• EFL college students
• rhetorical organization
• genre based approach
• process approach