THE ROLE OF REFORMULATION TASKS IN EFL LEARNERS’ WRITING ACCURACY

This study aimed to investigate the role of reformulation tasks including comparison, paraphrasing, and copying activities concerned with developing writing accuracy in composing one paragraph essays in English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing accuracy. To achieve this purpose, a placement test was used to make sure of the homogeneity of participants. Accordingly, 100 participants were selected out of the student majoring in English translation at Abadan Azad University. Then they were assigned to three experimental and one control groups, each comprised of 25 participants based on systematic random sampling. The experimental groups received reformulation tasks, whereas the control group was taught traditionally. In other words, the control group received usual practice in writing essays with no explicit focus on the nominated tasks covered by the experimental groups. Group A received comparison task, group B received paraphrasing task and group C received copying task. The study continued for one semester. The participants took a pretest of writing one-paragraph essay, evaluating their proficiency in writing accuracy. After the treatment sessions, the four groups sat for the post-test of writing a one-paragraph essay. The topics for both the pre-test and post-test were the same. A standard checklist developed by Yang and Zhang (2010) was used to score the essays. For calculating the results, One-way ANOVA was used to measure the differences among the groups. Then a Post-hoc Scheffe test was used to determine the most effective task. The results showed that reformulation tasks such as comparison and copying were beneficial for improving accuracy among EFL learners. They are comparison and copying tasks which improved learners’ writing accuracy. Thus this study may suggest that these two tasks could develop writing accuracy more effectively than the other tasks.