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.