Fixing the Underuse of Code Glosses in Iranian EFL Learners' Academic Writing: A Corpus-based Comparison of Three Pedagogical Approaches

In light of the importance of metadiscursive code glosses in establishing writer-reader interactions and the necessity of teaching these markers according to the genre of interest, this study aimed to evaluate the comparative effect of three instructional approaches on fixing the underuse of code glosses in Iranian intermediate English as a foreign language learners' expository essay. Sixty Iranian EFL learners with underuse of code glosses in the Iranian Corpus of Learner English were recruited through a purposive sampling procedure and randomly assigned to four groups: production-oriented approach, genre awareness, data-driven learning, and control. After the treatment phase, three 250-word expository essays were assigned to groups. Four learner corpora were compiled from the learners’ expository essays. Statistical comparisons of the corpora with their counterparts from the pre-treatment phase suggested significant improvements in the frequency of the use of code glosses in the production-oriented approach and data-driven learning groups but not in the genre awareness and control groups. Moreover, learners in the production-oriented approach group outperformed those in the data-driven learning group. Implications of the results, including the potential use of the production-oriented approach in the Iranian EFL context for the instruction of other metadiscourse types, in particular, and academic English instruction at large, have been considered.