THE EFFECTS OF STORY MAPPING ON PICTURE-GUIDED WRITING FOR EFL SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN TAIWAN

This study investigates the effects of story mapping instruction on the picture-guided writing performance of EFL senior high school students in Taiwan. Seventy-six juniors in high school from two classes in Ping-Jen Senior High School participated in the present study. The experiment lasted for ten weeks from March 2004 to May 2004. During the experiment, the participants underwent story mapping instruction, took a pre-test and post-test, responded to a questionnaire and were interviewed. Differences in the students’ story writing performance were analyzed in terms of the t-test results of three elements: word count, story grammar units and story writing performance. In addition, the qualitative data were summarized and discussed. Given both the quantitative and qualitative results, we consider that it is difficult to deny the important role played by the story mapping strategy in affecting students’ progress in story writing. Based on the findings, the researchers recommend that story mapping instruction be introduced to EFL writers as a pre-writing activity in the writing course.