Comparing the Effects of Four Instructional Treatments on EFL Students’ Achievement in Writing Classified Ads

The current study set out to compare the effect of traditional and non-traditional instructional treatments; i.e. explicit, implicit, task-based and no-instruction approaches on students’ abilities to learn how to write classified ads. 72 junior students who have all taken a course in Reading Journalistic Texts at the Payame-Noor University streamed by performing a TOEFL proficiency test. The selected participants were randomly divided into the following four groups; an explicit group which received direct instruction; an implicit group which were instructed indirectly, and the self-study group with no-instruction treatment in comparison to the task-based group which were asked to prepare a classified ad. A pre-test and a post-test were administered before and after the treatment. The moves in classified ads pre- and post- tests were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics. The quantitative analysis of the post-tests revealed that the explicit and task-based groups outperformed the implicit and self-study instruction groups. The findings of this research offer English teachers the chance to reconsider their practices and performances through the advantages and disadvantages of the traditional and new techniques which were employed in the current research and combine them to help learners improve their reading and writing skills.