Language Learning English Essay

With the advent of the more communicative approaches to language teaching, more attention has been given to communicative strategies to teach writing skill. Instead of focusing on the final product by writing teachers, various techniques can be employed to help language learners develop effective writing strategies in a continuous process and specially during pre-writing stage (Hayes and Flower). The present study investigated the effects on EFL learners’ writing ability of some visual aids and outlining during the pre-writing stage. To do so, 40 Iranian EFL learners completed four essay writing tasks i.e., writing without any pre-writing hint, writing using some picture cues, writing with teacher-made outline and writing with their own outlines.

Visual aids used were three items of equipment—counters, squares, and pictures. Results indicated that squares made a significant contribution to segmentation of two-phoneme words, but none of the visual aids made a difference on three-phoneme words.

Walker and Riu in a research verified the effects of different types of images used in multimedia teaching materials on the story understanding and story reproduction ability of Japanese language learners based on a Japanese fairy tale. Images were shown to promote both story understanding and story reproduction. In terms of story understanding, dynamic pictures were not always more effective than still pictures with designated standards; it was more effective to present important images selected from the story development. In terms of story reproduction, however, dynamic pictures were more effective than still pictures.

Ulper studied the effect of the schematic structure of story texts as a visual strategy on comprehension. He found that there was a positive contribution of the strategy used in the listening