Improving Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners' Writing Ability Using Various Prompt Lengths in Expository Writing

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the length of prompt on the learners'writing ability in expository writing. The main quantitative objective is to determine the impactof short/long prompt on the writing ability. It was hypothesized that, There is a significantdifference between Iranian EFL learners' expository writings who received long promptscompared with those who received short prompts. In this study, experimental randomizedsubjects pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design was used and 45 participants, comprisingthe three groups. One of the experimental groups received the long (3 sentences) and the other,short (1 sentence) prompt, while the control group experienced an impromptu situation.After ananalysis of variance (ANOVA), quantitative findings of the Levene's statistic test among thethree groups showed that, variances were equal (p> .05). This shows that (p value is smaller than.05, this means that there is a significant difference between short and long prompt and controlgroup in expository writing. For the qualitative analysis of the data, the findings revealed that,long prompt has noticeably affected the learners' performance. The content of the prompts hasprovided the prerequisites for the learners to create their writing and led to produce morecoherent and more cohesive chunks of writing.

Keywords:

Writing Ability , Expository Writing , Prompt