How to Enhance EFL Students’ English and Persian Argumentative Performance: What Does Explicit Argumentative Teaching Tell Us?

The studies on L2 argumentative writing have surveyed different dimensions of learners’ argumentative behavior and performance. However, less attention has been given to the strategies and techniques enhancing students’ argumentative repertoire. As such, the current study, which the design was repeated measures ANOVA, taking a pedagogy-based perspective, examined the argumentative writing behavior, introduced by Toulmin as Toulmin’s model, of 30 Iranian IELTS candidates before, during and after the instruction in both English and Persian languages. The sample questions were of the previous IELTS Writing part 2 essays from a real test by Cambridge University Press, chosen by 3 IELTS instructors in the Institute to meet the research objectives. To this end, 180 IELTS Task 2 argumentative essays were written by 30 volunteers, each having to write 6 essays, at least 250 words, (Persian and English). As for the students’ English and Persian argumentative writing performance, the results indicated that there were significant differences between the EFL learners’ overall means on argumentative tests in both languages. The results demonstrate that a sound pedagogy in argumentation can both influence the use of argumentation elements in both English and Persian written texts. The pedagogical implications for writing instruction and argumentative writing are discussed.