Students’ Doing Thematic Development And Concept Map Analyses To Enhance EFL Students’ Textual Competence

Abstract

Organizing and developing ideas in writing a text are problematic for many EFL learners although they have learned English for years. This challenges EFL teachers to design innovative learning techniques to solve the problem. This study investigated the students’ doing thematic progression and concept map analyses as learning techniques. It aims at finding out the effectiveness of the techniques to develop the EFL students’ textual competence to write argumentative texts, and to finally develop the genre-based approach to essay writing. The students’ textual competence means their competence in organizing ideas at the macro (text) and micro (paragraph) levels. This study is an experimental study done in a classroom context. Seventy EFL students were involved in this research; thirty five as a control group, thirty as an experimental group. The experimental group was exposed to texts and did thematic progression and concept map analyses, while the control group did not. The research results show that the students' doing concept maps and thematic development analyses are effective to enhance the students’ textual competence since these activities develop the students’ critical thinking skills and deep understanding. Thus, the researchers recommend that English teachers, with respect to developing the writing skills, consider the students’ doing thematic development and concept map analyses as an alternative strategy to enrich the teaching-learning process.