The Effect of Short Stories on the Iranian EFL Learner's Writing Accuracy and Complexity

The current study was an attempt to examine the effect of short story as an educational tool have any significant effect on the Iranian EFL learners’ writing accuracy and complexity. To this end, 60 Iranian EFL learners from Kanon Zaban language institute, in Zahedan, Iran, were selected and taken from the intermediate level classes. They were divided into equal groups as the experimental and control groups. The selected groups took a pretest of essay writing task to ascertain their homogeneity in terms of the initial writing ability. Next, the experimental group was taught based on the instruction via reading short stories. In the treatment phase, totally eight sessions of treatments were offered within eight weeks of instruction for experimental group. In this phase, during each session the students in experimental group was taught the materials using short stories in a way that after presenting the reading material they were asked to underline the unfamiliar vocabulary items and lexical combinations then tried to guess the meanings based on the context of the story. Then, learners were given time to exchange views about the items they learnt. At the end of each session, the researcher asked the participants to write a summary of the reviewed section of predetermined short story using the newly-learned vocabulary items and combinations. The participants in the control group were taught and practice classroom writing using traditional methods without any treatment. The obtained data were analyzed via conducting descriptive statistics and MANOVA. The results revealed that short story had a positively significant effect on the Iranian EFL learners’ writing accuracy and complexity. Finally, the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the study are presented.

The Effect of Short Stories on the Iranian EFL Learner's Writing Accuracy and Complexity Keywords:

Iranian EFL learners , Short Story , Writing Accuracy , Writing Complexity