a discourse-based teaching of writing for iranian efl students: a systemic perspective

the writing skill is often perceived as the most difficult language skill since it requires a higher level of productive language control than other skills (celce-murcia &amp; olshtain, 2000). the present study introduced a discourse-based framework for the teaching of writing on the basis systemic functional linguistics (sfl). to this end, 60 students majoring in teaching english as a foreign language (tefl) were selected from among three different universities and assigned to experimental and control groups. all subjects were pre-tested for homogeneity, and then the experimental group was treated with sfl-oriented discourse knowledge for ten sessions with the non-treated group just receiving the traditional method of teaching writing. following the treatment, a post-test was administered to the groups the results of which showed that there was a significant difference at p < .05 in the performance of the two groups on writing. it was concluded that the discourse-based teaching had a great effect on the writing of the iranian tefl majors.