Research Info

In ESL/EFL academic contexts, several studies have shown that learners face difficulties when developing secondary components of argumentative essays. The research reported here aimed to investigate if online teaching mode would affect the use and quality of counterarguments and rebuttals in a reading-to-write task. The assumption was that providing the learners with the source text in an online mode would reduce the psycholinguistic burden and, hence, give them more opportunities to develop secondary components of the texts. The study involved the participation of 44 Iranian female intermediate EFL learners (F = 44), aged between 22 and 25. They were assigned into two groups: Online reading-towrite group (ORW, N= 22), who received source reading passages in an online mode as an experimental group, and reading-to-write group (RW, N= 22), who received source reading passages in a traditional face-to-face mode as the control group. Data was collected by asking the participants to write an integrated argumentative essay after reading the source text. The use and quality of counterarguments and rebuttals were analyzed using the analytic scoring rubric named Qin and Karabakack (2010) and Stapletond and Wu (2015), respectively. Independent samples t- test and chi-square test were run to answer the research questions. The findings showed that the ORW group outperformed the RW group regarding the use and quality of counterarguments and rebuttals. The study discusses that integrated writing tasks in the flexible online mode can lessen the psycholinguistics barriers, which, in turn, promotes learners’ engagement with the source text and consequently directs their attention equally to both primary and secondary components of the argumentative text. The present study provides several implications for improving integrated writing practice.