Concept Mapping and Brainstorming Affecting Writing Anxiety and Accuracy

Persuasive/argumentative essays show how much a writer can implement his/her power to convince the reader in favor of his desired intention. However, many writers might encounter different types of challenges during the task of writing and wonder how to overcome them. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of concept mapping and brainstorming on the lexical and grammatical accuracy and writing anxiety of Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative essays. In doing so, ninety male and female students ranging from 17 to 35 in Iran National Language Institution (INLI) in Tehran were selected through cluster sampling based on convenience. An essay writing test and the second language writing anxiety inventory (SLWAI) were used both as pre- and post-test. The students were randomly assigned to three equal groups to experience different treatments in a 15-session semester. For data analysis, three separate one-way ANCOVA procedures were used. The results showed that both experimental groups did better than the control group. In lexical accuracy, the two experimental groups had almost the same mean scores, but in grammatical accuracy and writing anxiety, the concept mapping group obtained the highest mean followed by the brainstorming group. The findings of the study can have useful implications for teachers, students, material designers, and language assessors.