Argumentation across Ll and L2: Examination of Three Instructional Treatments of Genre-based Approach to Teaching Writing

The aim of the current study is twofold: first, as bidirectional transfer has not been a common object of inquiry, the present study attempted to fill this gap by examining how bidirectional transfer occurs in the English and Persian writing of Iranian students, and second, this study shed some light on whether or not genre awareness could be achieved through explicit, implicit or without formal instruction. There have been 104 sophomore students who have all been passing a course in Essay Writing at the Payame-Noor University. They have been homogenized by performing a TOEFL proficiency test. The participants were randomly divided into the following three groups, an experimental group which received explicit genre- based approach, a control group which was instructed implicitly in comparison to the self study group with no-instruction treatment. A pre-test and a post-test were administered before and after the treatment. The quantitative analysis of the post-argumentative essays revealed that the experimental group outperformed the implicit and no-formal instruction groups after receiving models with explicit instruction on the elements of Toulmin's (2003) model under study. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.