Investigation of the Impact of Prompt Type on Writing Performance of Pre-service Teachers based on continuation task
Nader Afshoun pour
1
(
Department of English Language, Malayer Branch, Islamic Azad University, Malayer, Iran.
)
Payman Rajabi
2
(
Assistant Professor, Department of English Language, Malayer Branch, Islamic Azad University, Malayer, Iran
)
Hossein Ahmadi
3
(
Department of English Language, Malayer Branch, Islamic Azad University, Malayer, Iran
)
Keywords: Writing assessment, Prompt type, Writing performance, EFL writing.,
Abstract :
This study examined the effect of the writing prompt properties on Iranian EFL pre-service teachers` essay writing. The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment. Language-test developers’ understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on test-takers’ performance with regard to this task is still in its infancy. In this study we study the effect of prompt type on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing performance in a continuation task. Four groups of Iranian EFL learners performed a continuation task with four different prompts and filled out a writing strategy questionnaire. 120 participants will be chosen from the population of Iranian EFL pre-service teachers majoring in English and the participants’ continuations were scored holistically and textually analyzed using a range of fluency, grammatical accuracy, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, cohesion, and source-use features. Prompt type significantly affected the participants’ overall continuation writing scores, syntactic complexity, cohesion, and source-use features.