Applying Semantic Mapping in EFL Writing Classroom: A Study on Taiwanese Beginning Writers

The purpose of this study is to investigate if the semantic mapping instruction, which represents English paragraph structures visually and hierarchically by means of semantic maps teaching EFL students the knowledge of English rhetorical structure and writing conventions, is effective in assisting the beginning EFL writers to write English expository paragraphs with regard to the categories of organization and content. As shown in the results, after the experiment instruction, the subjects' English written products improved significantly with regard to the categories of content and organization, and they reported in the questionnaire that the instruction was useful and helpful. It is thus argued that explicitly teaching EFL beginning writers the rhetoric convention and text structure of the target language can ease their anxiety and lower the demand on their cognitive capacity and thus result in better writing performance despite the delimitations of the study.