Comparison of Free-writing and Word-matching Activities as EFL Pre-reading Tasks

The present study investigates the possibility of using a free-writing task as efl pre-reading activity. it studies how the free-writing task to raise efl readers’ schematic knowledge compares with a more traditional pre-reading activity, i.e., pre-teaching of vocabulary. the participants, who were seventy-two iranian upper intermediate efl students majoring in english, were assigned into three homogenous groups that were randomly labelled as ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’. two groups, namely, a and c, were randomly designated for free-writing treatment. these participants received specific instructions and practice on free-writing for 15 minutes. all the participants were then given a reading comprehension task, with a reading passage and subsequent comprehension questions. group a was given 5 minutes to free-write about the topic of the passage before doing the test. group b was treated with pre-teaching a list of vocabulary to be seen in the passage. group c was treated with a combination of the free-writing activity and pre-teaching the list of vocabulary. the mean scores obtained by the three groups were submitted to data analysis using one-way analysis of variance (anova) as the statistical test to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the mean score of the three groups. results of the data analysis showed the importance of free-writing as a pre-reading task to activate the readers’ background knowledge (schema).