THE EFFECT OF TEACHER’S DIFFERENT COMMENT TYPES ON IRANIAN EFL WRITING ACHIEVEMENT

The present study examines the effect of teacher’s comment types, namely, imperatives and questions on Iranian EFL writing achievement. 57 Iranian university students aged between 19-26 majoring in English teaching- were assigned to three homogeneous groups, based on their scores on the oxford placement test (OPT) and a sample paragraph on a given topic, emphasizing the expository genre. Three groups-two experimental and one control group- covered three topics in a sequence of six written texts-before and after receiving feedback-over a7-week period. The researcher scored the papers analytically, examining four parts: vocabulary, grammer, organization, and mechanics. A posttest was administered to all groups. The posttest was a paragraph writing assignment in expository genre. The results of posttest revealed that at probability level of p= .000 three groups were significantly different. In order to find out where the exact difference(s) is/are, a Scheffe post hoc test was executed. The findings generally show that the participants' writings improved through employing the teacher written comments including imperatives and questions and specifically those who received imperative comments outperformed the participants who received comments including questions (p= .031).The results also showed that those who received comments with imperatives did made improvements in the vocabulary and organization of their writings in comparison with those who received question comments. The findings of this study are practically useful for EFL writing teachers and students and theoretically contribute to better understanding the nature of EFL writing process, especially at revision stage.