The effect of the explicit teaching of thematic structure and generic structure on EFL students’ writing quality and motivation

The aim of this study is to explore the effect of teaching explicitly thematic structure and generic structure on EFL students’ writing quality and motivation towards learning and writing in English. For this, I conducted a 14-week quasi-experiment in a university in Bahrain during the first semester of 2011-2012. I drew on a mixed methods research approach. The quantitative data involved writing tests and questionnaires and the qualitative data semi-structured interviews. I used four groups: three experimental groups and one control group. The former were given three different treatments: thematic structure (TS), generic structure (GS), and a combination of thematic and generic groups (TGS). I administered pre-, mid-, and post-tests to all groups, marked the writing scripts holistically and analytically, and calculated the marks statistically using SPSS. The findings revealed significant differences between the three experimental and control groups but no differences among the three experimental groups. The students in the latter groups wrote more coherent and cohesive texts as a result of the interventions. This led to an in-depth analysis of 45 scripts of the post-test for the three groups to assess hidden differences. The findings revealed differences between the TGS and TS groups and the GS group in two thematic progression patterns. The overall findings suggest that teaching TS and GS helped to improve students’ writing quality in terms of coherence but in terms of cohesion the teaching of TS helped the students more. I used questionnaires and semi-structured interviews before and after the intervention. The questionnaires involved all groups and the interviews only the three experimental groups. The findings showed that the motivation and attitudes of the three experimental groups were enhanced towards learning and writing in English. This improvement was measured in terms of a number of motivational constructs related to the field of motivation in L2. These included forming positive attitudes, enhanced self-efficacy, increased self-esteem and confidence, decreased learning anxiety, higher learning autonomy, improved ideal L2 self, willingness to communicate, and greater awareness of learning goals and factors that might influence their writing.