The Effect of teaching bare vs vocabulary Prompts on Self-Regulated Writing of EFL Iranian Learners

The present study intended to see whether different prompts (bare, and vocabulary) could exert different effects on the overall quality of the Iranian intermediate EFL learners' self-regulated writing performances or not, and in case of effect, which of the prompts was more efficacious toward the enhancement of the participants' self-regulated writing. Forty-five male Iranian intermediate students learning English as a foreign language were selected via administering the Preliminary English Test (PET). They were divided into three experimental groups (bare, vocabulary control). They were given various prompts for eight consecutive weeks to write. The writing task involved the descriptive mode of discourse. Each task was presented in the context of writing a text for an imaginary person. The bare prompt group was exposed to only a single topic to write on each session, whereas the vocabulary prompt group received a couple of lexical items on a specific topic alongside their Persian equivalents. Running ANCOVA statistics, the final results manifested the fact that the bare model elicited a better overall writing quality compared to the vocabulary model.