CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING TASKS: EXPLORING LEARNERS’ PERCEPTIONS AND ITS EFFECT ON THE USE OF TEXTUAL METADISCOURSE MARKERS IN WRITING

This study embarks upon probing the effectiveness of using consciousness-raising tasks (CRT) on the EFL learners’ knowledge of textual meta -discourse markers in expository writing. The participants of the study included 23 Iranian EFL Intermediate English language learners whose homogeneity was ensured by administering Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Two groups of Non CRT (NCRT) and CRT were formed as the control and the experimental groups respectively. CRT group was provided with CR tasks related to textual metadiscourse markers while the NCRT group received the conventional intervention. The intervention lasted nine sessions, each one and a half hours. After the intervention, a semi structured interview was conducted to explore the learners’ perceptions on writing instruction. The results of descriptive, inferential and textual interpretive analysis revealed that incorporating CRT in the EFL writing classroom resulted in the EFL learners’ significant improvement in using textual metadiscourse markers. Moreover, the thematic analysis of the focus group interview uncovered positive perceptions of the CRT group toward the writing course

کلیدواژه ها:

Consciousness-raising tasks ، expository writing ، textual metadiscourse markers ، teaching writing