چکیده:
The current literature on second language pedagogy promotes a return to some
form-focused instruction where collaborative tasks are encouraged. This study
reports on the impact of form-focused instruction and peer revision (text-editing
collaborative task) on subjects’ final performance in second language writing in
two rhetorical modes of narration and exposition produced by 60 junior and senior
students of English divided equally into the controlled and experimental groups.
The results confirmed that form-focused instruction has a better impact on simple
than complex grammatical elements. The study also confirmed the significant
effect of the form-focused instruction on the inter-lingual errors, and it revealed
some positive effects of collaborative task especially on more proficient learners.
The findings also disclosed that different processes are involved in editing as well
as reconstructing expository and narrative genres. The fact that writing narrative
texts was more demanding than the exposition for the learners implies the
complexity of this genre in terms of cognitive processing and linguistic
presentation, hence a more involvement of writing teachers on this genre is
recommended.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Text Editing and Reconstructing in EFL Writings of Narrative and Exposition: A Study in Form-focused Approach Hossein Shokouhi * Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, Shahid Chamran University, Ahvaz, Iran & Zahra Alishahi M.
It sets out to investigate the progress of tertiary EFL learners in a form-focused writing task (text-editing) which requires subjects to work on the formal aspects of writing through collaborative reflection on the texts containing some deliberately-made errors in the formal aspects of writing.
Method This study is intended to evaluate the merits of a particular type of form-focused instruction in second language writing, and to investigate how a form-focused collaborative task type, namely text-editing, affects the writing ability of tertiary EFL students.
Text-editing task and subjects’ attention to formal aspects of writing: Grammatical accuracy Using a quantitative approach to the data analysis, we found that form-focused instruction had advantageous effect on helping the progress of learning formal aspects of writing.
Conclusion This study claims that the benefit of form-focused collaborative tasks is that when learners work together to recognize and correct the deliberately-made errors in the text editing task, the verbalization of the problems they encounter and the availability of peers’ and teacher’s feedback may act to enhance their attention to formal aspects of writing.
As for the genre type and its effect on learners’ writing ability, the results revealed that although the experimental group outperformed the control group in editing and reconstructing of both genres, further analysis of the edited and reconstructed expository and narrative genres has shown that these two tasks are more complex for the learners in narrative than expository genre."