چكيده
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the contribution of
the process based approach to writing, in comparison with the traditional,
product oriented approach, to the writing quality of EFL learners. It was also
intended to investigate the role of topic interest on the EFL learners’ writing
quality. The questions of the study were (1) whether the process oriented
writing has any impact on the writing proficiency of the Iranian EFL university
students majoring in English and (2) whether the topic interest factor has any
impact on the writing proficiency of Iranian EFL university students majoring
in English. To do so, the participants had to be checked in terms of both
writing and general language proficiency. In the first stage, a TOEFL test
(1995) was administered and 61 subjects who were considered to be one
standard deviation above and below the mean were selected. Then the
writing pretest was administered, and 42 subjects who were one standard
deviation above and below the mean were chosen. They were divided into
three groups each with 14 subjects. Two experimental groups (one for
process oriented approach and the other one for the role of topic interest)
and one control group (the traditional product oriented approach) received
their treatment and placebo; the treatment was process oriented writing,
along with some pre-writing strategies for the experimental group A, and
providing participants with the topics based on their interest in experimental
group B. the control group was the traditional product based writing which is
used in most writing classes around the world. The study lasted for 14
sessions, and during this period of time, different types of paragraphs were
taught. After this period, a writing post test was delivered and the papers
were evaluated by 3 raters. After calculating the inter-rater reliability and
observing a high correlation of the three sets of scores, the means of the
