Boosting a Language Skill by Employing Translation in Task-based Language Teaching: News- Story Writing in Focus

This study aims to examine the effects of employing a mere Task-Based Approach (TB) and a Translation-Assisted Task-Based Approach (TATB) in promoting EFL learners’ news story writing skill. The subjects who participated in this study were 82 Iranian BA sophomores majoring in translation at Islamic Azad University, Hamedan Branch. To this aim, the participants were homogeneously assigned to two groups, i.e. control group (TB) and the experimental group (TATB). Both groups passed through the different phases of Willis’ TBL framework and the translation task was given only to the experimental or the TATB group. In other words, both groups were exposed to a 6-week TB intervention with only the experimental group benefiting from the translation practice at the end of the third phase. To obtain the related data, the researchers administered an evaluation exam on news-story writing at the pre- and post-task evaluation phases, itself prepared by the researchers and put to the test of expert judgment. The results showed that TATB group outperformed the mere TB group which indicates that applying translation-assisted task-based approach in teaching news story writing could significantly improve both the experimental group’s overall performance on news-story writing and some of its different aspects such as the use of Wh/H data, word choice, context, consistency, structure, and simple language.