This study was an attempt to compare and contrast the frequency of the use of cohesive devices in<br />independent and integrated essays written by 95 upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners to find out<br />about any possible changes in the type and frequency of using cohesive devices due to the nature of the<br />writing task. The participants were native speakers of Farsi between 18 to 30 years old, studying<br />English as a foreign language in an English language center in Yazd, Iran. The sample included 58<br />female and 37 male students. They were asked to compose an integrated argumentative essay after<br />reading a text and listening to a lecture on the same topic as it is designed in TOEFL iBT® writing test.<br />The participants first completed an independent task which had a prompt to write about and then<br />completed an integrated writing task with a two-week interval between the writing sessions. The tasks<br />were taken from the TOEFL iBT® writing task. Results indicated that there was a significant difference<br />in the use of almost all types of cohesive devices between the two conditions with the independent task<br />producing essays with lower cohesive device counts. The results revealed that in terms of textual<br />cohesion, the participants preferred using anaphoric references to cataphoric references while<br />substitution and ellipsis in both independent and integrated sample writings were rarely used. The<br />students were also found to be better at using references and lexical cohesion in their integrated<br />writings than in their independent essays. Finally, it can be concluded that the integrated writing task<br />has positive effects on the students’ use of cohesive devices. The results of this study provide evidence<br />on the effect of test method on writing performance and may advocate the use of integrated writing<br />tasks to provide a better picture of students' writing abilities.
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