A Cognitive Load –Based Program to Develop Student Teachers′ EFL Argumentative Writing and Reduce Apprehension…

Introduction

Writing is one of the four language skills that help learners to express their ideas and intentions to readers in a written form. There are different forms of writing such as expository, descriptive, narrative and argumentative. Argumentative writing is considered the most complex genre of writing. This is because it involves several sub-tasks such as stating a clear claim, using logical and clear evidence to support the argument, stating counterargument, developing refutation to convince the reader with the author’s point of view, writing a good conclusion and addressing conventions of grammar, mechanics and style. This imposes great difficulties on EFL learners at the cognitive and affective levels of writing.
 Apprehension as one of the prominent affective factors has stimulated particular attention in foreign language learning because of its potential negative effects (Mohseniasl, 2014). The term writing apprehension was coined by Daly and Miller (1975) to express the general anxiety that some individuals experience about writing (Autman & Kelly, 2017). It has a bad impact on students’ writing performance, making them appear less clever than they are (Britt, 2011).
Argumentative writing can be developed and writing apprehension can be reduced through the use of cognitive load as the researcher hypothesizes. Cognitive load is an instructional theory generated from the work of educational psychologist Sweller in 1980s (Suek, 2018). It has been applied and developed in many areas including language teaching particularly teaching English as a foreign language. It aims to reduce cognitive load imposed on the working memory, enhance schema construction and consequently automation, facilitate the teaching and learning process, help the teacher sharpen his/ her teaching skills .Thus, it leads to better learning outcomes.