the effect of teaching writing skills on ideology transfer in academic writings of efl students: the case of iranian ielts candidates

This study aimed at investigating the effect of teaching writing skills on ideology transfer in academic writings of efl students. to this end, a sequential mixed methods design was used. the participants of the study consisted of 80 male and female ielts candidates selected based on some criteria such as level, age, and educational background. the instruments of the study included a sample mock writing task 2 and a sample ielts writing task 2, as the pre-test and post-test respectively. learners’ essays produced during these stages were compared and analyzed based on fairclough’s (2001) model of critical discourse analysis which was applied at three levels, description, interpretation, and explanation. to analyze the data, qualitative and quantitative content analysis methods were applied during which discursive strategies used by students were discovered, examined, and coded, and the frequency and percentage of them were extracted. the results of data analysis showed that generally, the following factors were identified in the participants’ writings, as representing ideology transfer: tendency towards representation of social, cultural and gender identity, use of active voices, use of first-person pronouns, social views, author visibility, ideology-laden concepts, and idea development. moreover, there were significant changes in the post-test writings of the participants compared to their pre-test writings in terms of ideology transfer. this showed that teaching writing skills had a significant effect on efl students’ ability to transfer their ideology in academic writings. the findings have some implications for efl learners, teachers, curriculum planners, and researchers.