Nasim Ghanbari

In ESL/EFL academic contexts, several studies have shown that learners face difficulties when developing secondary components of argumentative essays (i.e., counterarguments and rebuttals). This has been attributed to different linguistic, psycholinguistic and cultural factors involved in developing argumentative writing. 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. For this aim, a body of 44 Iranian EFL learners were assigned into two groups: Online reading-to-write 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 in this study. The findings showed that ORW group outperformed RW group regarding the use and quality of counterarguments and rebuttals. In addition, ORW group performed better than the RW for developing counterarguments and rebuttals. The study discusses that integrated writing tasks in the flexible online mode would lessen the psycholinguistic barriers which in turn promote enhanced learners’ engagement with the source text and consequently direct their attention equally to both primary and secondary components of the argumentative text. The present study provides several implications for teachers and curriculum designers to improve EFL argumentative writing.