THE EFFECT OF GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS ON EFL LEARNERS' WRITING SKILL

The present study is an attempt to investigate the impact of Graphic Organizers on developing writing skills of Iranian intermediate EFL learners, and to compare two major types of GOs (discourse structure graphic organizer and generic format graphic organizer). Attaining forgoing goals two groups of experimental and one group of control were chosen among female high school students of Khalkhal who had passed at least 20 semesters in language institutes. These samples were in sum 60 students in 3 intact classes. By administering pretest it was proved that these groups were homogenous. The control group was trained by conventional instruction of writing textbook whereas one of the experimental groups was treated by means of discourse structure graphic organizer and the other experimental group was trained using generic format graphic organizer. After one semester of treatment, posttest was administered to all groups of study and after analyzing the obtained data by SPSS software, we could conclude that both DSGOs and GFGO improved the students writing skill and comparing the effect of these two it was proved that both types had roughly the same effect and DSGO was not more effective than GFGO type. Therefore, if in teaching writing we make the students familiar with two major types of GOs we can get the best result, namely if students can distinguish between the organization of words and sentences in two GO types surly their writing will be improved.