A Discourse-based Teaching of Writing for Iranian EFL Students: A Systemic Perspective

The writing skill is often perceived as the most difficult language skill since it requires a higher level of productive language control than other skills (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000). The present study introduced a discourse-based framework for the teaching of writing on the basis Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). To this end, 60 students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) were selected from among three different universities and assigned to experimental and control groups. All subjects were pre-tested for homogeneity, and then the experimental group was treated with SFL-oriented discourse knowledge for ten sessions with the non-treated group just receiving the traditional method of teaching writing. Following the treatment, a post-test was administered to the groups the results of which showed that there was a significant difference at p < .05 in the performance of the two groups on writing. It was concluded that the discourse-based teaching had a great effect on the writing of the Iranian TEFL majors.