The Development and Validation of a Systemic Genre-Based Framework for Assessment of Iranian EFL Learners’ Expository Writing

Over the last years, systemic functional and genre-based approaches have contributed elaborately to how genre is assumed and administered in textual analysis and language teaching. Applying these approaches to EFL settings can enhance teachers and learners’ understanding of the essence of language use and usage in different contexts. Teachers can administer these approaches in teaching and assessment of language skills and sub-skills based on particular content and genres. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the way by which raters of expository texts written by advanced EFL learners make their scoring decisions using the framework proposed in this study. The analysis of the collected responses related to the interview demonstrated several main and secondary themes resulting from the thematic classification. The main themes included context of culture, context of situation, and lexico-grammatical features. Accordingly, context of culture was defined in terms of two secondary themes of semantic formatting and content formatting. The main them of context of situation is regarded in terms of field, tenor, and mode. Moreover, the final lexico-grammar theme was considered as ideational, interpersonal, and textual themes. These themes evidently fit in the framework and approaches developed by Halliday and Martin. The findings indicated that EFL teachers’ conceptualizations of grammar changed from a traditional sentence-level, form-focused viewpoint to a more functional comprehension working in interrelated manners across lexico-grammatical, discourse semantic, and generic structures of the texts. The findings are beneficial for EFL teachers and learners.