Comparison of Free-writing and Word-matching Activities as EFL Pre-reading Tasks

The present study investigates the possibility of using a free-writing task as EFL pre-reading activity. It studies how the free-writing task to raise EFL readers’ schematic knowledge compares with a more traditional pre-reading activity, i.e., pre-teaching of vocabulary. The participants, who were seventy-two Iranian upper intermediate EFL students majoring in English, were assigned into three homogenous groups that were randomly labelled as ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’. Two groups, namely, A and C, were randomly designated for free-writing treatment. These participants received specific instructions and practice on free-writing for 15 minutes. All the participants were then given a reading comprehension task, with a reading passage and subsequent comprehension questions. Group A was given 5 minutes to free-write about the topic of the passage before doing the test. Group B was treated with pre-teaching a list of vocabulary to be seen in the passage. Group C was treated with a combination of the free-writing activity and pre-teaching the list of vocabulary. The mean scores obtained by the three groups were submitted to data analysis using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) as the statistical test to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the mean score of the three groups. Results of the data analysis showed the importance of free-writing as a pre-reading task to activate the readers’ background knowledge (schema).