the effectiveness of close test practices on the writing skills of iranian adult efl learners

The focus of this paper is to reveal the effects of close test practices and conventional method of writing instruction on the writing skill of iranian efl learners. it also attempts to clarify if there are any differences between the effect of cloze test practices on students writing skill and scoring methods. to achieve the purposes of the research, 70 iranian efl learners at intermediate level of language proficiency who were native speakers of persian were chosen as the study population. in the first step, english proficiency test was administered to select the participants. after administering the proficiency test, the learners were divided into two groups of control and experiment. all two groups of participants took a pre-test before the treatment. after the pre-test, students in two groups were exposed to instructional programs. experimental group was instructed through the use of close test practices and the other one received treatment based on the conventional methods of writing instruction. in addition to these, in the experimental group the two scoring methods of close test known as “exact word” and “acceptable word” were used so as to examine the effects of scoring methods on the learners writing achievement. after applying the treatment, two groups took writing post-test which consisted of the same topic that had been used in the pre-test. finally, analyzing data and using paired and independent samples t tests indicated that close test practices had significant effects on the writing skill of iranian efl learners, while conventional method of writing instruction did not have any significant effects on their writing skill. the last finding was that there was not a difference between scoring methods and the effect of cloze test practices on students writing skill.