THE EFFECTS OF CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTION ON THE WRITING SKILLS OF IRANIAN INTERMEDIATE EFL LEARNERS

Over the past few years, miscellaneous approaches to the teaching of writing as well as to the examining of the effectiveness of these approaches have emerged. Among these, content-based language Instruction (CBLI) focuses on teaching writing through the implementation of the subject matters learners are required to cover in their curriculum. CBLI tries to empower students to become independent learners and continue the learning process beyond the classroom. This study aims to investigate the effects of CBLI on the writing abilities of intermediate ESP learners in Iran. Subjects are intermediate juniors majoring in Psychology in Garmsar University. The subjects were pre-assigned to either the experimental group (group A) or the control group (group B). The language proficiency level of the subjects was measured. Also, a writing pre-test was administered in order to ensure the homogeneity of the subjects in thevwriting skills prior to the experiment. The experimental group enjoyed CBLI drawing of content-based psychology curriculum. The control group enjoyed the same amount of writing instruction using general texts. At the end, a TOEFL writing post-test and another test of TOEFL general proficiency was administered. The gathered data was analyzed through several independent and paired sample T-tests. The results indicated that CBI had a significant impact on developing writing skills of Iranian intermediate ESP learners.