Search results for: academic essay writing

Authors: Danielle L. Iamarino

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This paper explores the embattled territory of academic creative writing—and most focally, the use of critical theory in the teaching and structuring of creative practice. It places creative writing in contemporary social, cultural, and otherwise anthropological contexts, and evaluates conventional creative writing pedagogies based on how well they serve the updated needs of increasingly diverse student congregations. With continued emphasis on student-centered learning, this paper compares theoretical to practical applications of discipline-specific knowledge, examining and critiquing theory in terms of its relevance, accessibility, and whether or not it is both actionable and beneficial in the creative writing classroom.

Keywords: creative writing, literary theory, content, pedagogy, workshop, teaching

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Authors: Unity Nkateng

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New forms of academic writing such as apprenticeship genres are developing in the field of applied linguistics. However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed the issue of social work students in Botswana. The paper addresses the issue of academic writing with special attention to the types of documents written by University of Botswana (UB) social work students on their fieldwork placement. The research method for this study combines two major research tools in the qualitative inquiry which are text analysis and interviews in order to investigate the context in which the texts are produced. 12 students were consulted and gave their consent for the study. 26 case reports were collected from the Department of Social work at the University of Botswana. The findings show that the case reports students write during their fieldwork placements have 6 moves, which focus on the clients’ story and describe what the students have done and achieved. The significance is that the discrepancy between professional writing and students writing raise questions about the extent to which students are being prepared for professional writing. Students have indicated that their academic writing varies according to the preferences of individual lecturers rather than the requirement of the work situation.

Keywords: apprenticeship genres, client's voice, material processes, relational possesive processes

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Authors: Chaiwat Tantarangsee

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The purposes of this study are: 1) to study the frequent English writing errors of students registering the course: Reading and Writing English for Academic Purposes II, and 2) to find out the results of writing error correction by using coded indirect corrective feedback and writing error treatments. Samples include 28 2nd year English Major students, Faculty of Education, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University. Tool for experimental study includes the lesson plan of the course; Reading and Writing English for Academic Purposes II, and tool for data collection includes 4 writing tests of short texts. The research findings disclose that frequent English writing errors found in this course comprise 7 types of grammatical errors, namely Fragment sentence, Subject-verb agreement, Wrong form of verb tense, Singular or plural noun endings, Run-ons sentence, Wrong form of verb pattern and Lack of parallel structure. Moreover, it is found that the results of writing error correction by using coded indirect corrective feedback and error treatment reveal the overall reduction of the frequent English writing errors and the increase of students’ achievement in the writing of short texts with the significance at .05.

Keywords: coded indirect corrective feedback, error correction, error treatment, frequent English writing errors

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Authors: Laura Naka

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The invention of computer writing programs has changed the way of teaching second language writing. This artificial intelligence engine can provide students with feedback on their essays, on their grammatical and spelling errors, convenient writing and editing tools to facilitate student’s writing process. However, it is not yet proved if this technology is helping students to improve their writing skills. There are several programs that are of great assistance for students concerning their writing skills. New technology provides students with different software programs which enable them to be more creative, to express their opinions and ideas in words, pictures and sounds, but at the end main and most correct feedback should be given by their teachers. No matter how new technology affects in writing skills, always comes from their teachers. This research will try to present some of the advantages and disadvantages that new technology has in writing process for students. The research takes place in the University of Gjakova ‘’Fehmi Agani’’ Faculty of Education-Preschool Program. The research aims to provide random sample response by using questionnaires and observation.

Keywords: English language learning, technology, academic writing, teaching L2.

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Authors: Mei Lin, Chang Liu

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Argumentative writing is the most prevalent genre in diverse writing tests. How to construct academic arguments is often regarded as a difficult task by most English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A failure to generate enough ideas and organise them coherently and logically as well as a lack of competence in supporting their arguments with relevant evidence are frequent problems faced by EFL learners when approaching an English argumentative writing task. Overall, these problems are closely related to planning, and planning an argumentative writing at pre-writing stage plays a vital role in a good academic essay. However, how teachers can effectively guide students to generate ideas is rarely discussed in planning English argumentative writing, apart from brainstorming. Brainstorming has been a common practice used by teachers to help students generate ideas. However, some limitations of brainstorming suggest that it can help students generate many ideas, but ideas might not necessarily be coherent and logic, and could sometimes impede production. It calls for a need to explore effective instructional strategies at pre-writing stage of English argumentative writing. This paper will first examine how a Six Thinking Hats approach can be used to provide a dialogic space for EFL learners to experience and collaboratively generate ideas from multiple perspectives at pre-writing stage. Part of the findings of the impact of a twelve-week intervention (from March to July 2021) on students learning to generate ideas through engaging in group discussions of using Six Thinking Hats will then be reported. The research design is based on the sociocultural theory. The findings present evidence from a mixed-methods approach and fifty-nine participants from two first-year undergraduate natural classes in a Chinese university. Analysis of pre- and post- questionnaires suggests that participants had a positive attitude toward the Six Thinking Hats approach. It fosters their understanding of prewriting and argumentative writing, helps them to generate more ideas not only from multiple perspectives but also in a systematic way. A comparison of participants writing plans confirms an improvement in generating counterarguments and rebuttals to support their arguments. Above all, visual and transcripts data of group discussion collected from different weeks throughout the intervention enable teachers and researchers to ‘see’ the hidden process of learning to generate ideas in action.

Keywords: argumentative writing, innovative pedagogy, six thinking hats, dialogic space, prewriting, higher education

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Authors: Rory Patrick O'Kane

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More universities and third level institutions now require at least an IELTS Band 6 for entry into courses of study for non-native speakers of English. This presentation focuses on IELTS Academic Writing Tasks 1 and 2 and in particular on the marking criterion of Coherence and Cohesion. A requirement for candidates aiming at Band 6 and above is that they produce answers which show a clear, overall progression of information and ideas and which use cohesive devices effectively. With this in mind, the presenter will examine what exactly is meant by coherence and cohesion and various strategies which can be used to assist students in improving their scores in this area. A number of classroom teaching ideas will be introduced, and participants will have the opportunity to compare and discuss sample answers written by candidates for this examination with a specific focus on coherence and cohesion. Intended audience: Teachers of IELTS Academic Writing.

Keywords: coherence, cohesion, IELTS, strategies

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Authors: Mette Pedersen

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This paper outlines the criteria that assessment specialists use when they design the 'Persuasive Essay' task for the four Advanced Placement World Language and Culture Exams (AP French, German, Italian, and Spanish). The 'Persuasive Essay' is a free-response, source-based, standardized measure of presentational writing. Each 'Persuasive Essay' item consists of three sources (an article, a chart, and an audio) and a prompt, which is a statement of the topic phrased as an interrogative sentence. Due to its richness of source materials and due to the amount of time that test takers are given to prepare for and write their responses (a total of 55 minutes), the 'Persuasive Essay' is the free-response task on the AP World Language and Culture Exams that goes to the greatest lengths to unleash the test takers' proficiency potential. The author focuses on the work that goes into designing the 'Persuasive Essay' task, outlining best practices for the selection of topics and sources, the interplay that needs to be present among the sources and the thinking behind the articulation of prompts for the 'Persuasive Essay' task. Using released 'Persuasive Essay' items from the AP World Language and Culture Exams and accompanying data on test taker performance, the author shows how different passages, and features of passages, have succeeded (and sometimes not succeeded) in eliciting writing proficiency among test takers over time. Data from approximately 215.000 test takers per year from 2014 to 2017 and approximately 35.000 test takers per year from 2012 to 2013 form the basis of this analysis. The conclusion of the study is that test taker performance improves significantly when the sources that test takers are presented with express directly opposing viewpoints. Test taker performance also improves when the interrogative prompt that the test takers respond to is phrased as a yes/no question. Finally, an analysis of linguistic difficulty and complexity levels of the printed sources reveals that test taker performance does not decrease when the complexity level of the article of the 'Persuasive Essay' increases. This last text complexity analysis is performed with the help of the 'ETS TextEvaluator' tool and the 'Complexity Scale for Information Texts (Scale)', two tools, which, in combination, provide a rubric and a fully-automated technology for evaluating nonfiction and informational texts in English translation.

Keywords: advanced placement world language and culture exams, designing presentational writing assessments, large-scale standardized assessments of written language proficiency, source-based language testing

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Authors: Avasha Rambiritch, Adelia Carstens

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In especially the context of a writing center, learning takes place during, and as part of, the conversations between the writing center tutor and the student. This interaction or dialogue is an integral part of writing center research and is the focus of this largely qualitative study, employing a politeness lens. While there is some research on positive politeness strategies employed by writing center tutors, there is very little research on specifically praising as a positive politeness strategy. This study attempts to fill this gap by analyzing a corpus of 10 video-recorded consultations to determine how tutors in a writing center utilize the positive politeness strategy of praise. Findings indicate that while tutors exploit a range of politeness strategies, praise is used more often than any other strategy. The research indicates that praise as a politeness strategy is utilized significantly more when commenting on higher-order concerns, as in line with the writing center literature. The benefits of this study include insights into how such analyses can be used to better prepare and equip the tutors (usually postgraduate students appointed as part-time tutors in the writing center) for the work they do on a daily basis.

Keywords: writing center, academic writing, positive politeness, tutor

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Authors: Mabel Ortiz, Claudio Díaz

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This paper explores Chilean pre-service teachers' perceptions about the provision of corrective feedback in a wiki environment during the collaborative writing of an argumentative essay. After conducting a semi-structured interview on 22 participants, the data were processed through the content analysis technique. The results show that students have positive perceptions about corrective feedback, provided through a wiki virtual environment, which in turn facilitates feedback provision and impacts language learning effectively. Some of the positive perceptions about virtual feedback refer to permanent access, efficiency, simultaneous revision and immediacy. It would then be advisable to integrate wiki-based feedback as a methodology for the language classroom and collaborative writing tasks.

Keywords: argumentative essay, focused corrective feedback, perception, wiki environment

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Authors: Hadiza Lawan Ismail

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Academic writing in Nigeria is fraught with a lot of grammatical errors which brings backward to education specifically at the tertiary institution level. This paper deals with the use of English quantifiers in academic writing, with particular emphasis on the use of ‘MANY.’ NCEI students of the Federal College of Education, Kano were used as the case study. The paper attempts to highlight the problems that arise due to incorrect use of quantifiers as well as identifying the causes of difficulties in the use of English quantifiers by some NCE1 students. To achieve this objective, the data was collected through sentence writing test by testing the students’ use of quantifiers, using only one quantifier as the variable of the study, which is MANY. In analyzing the data, the sentence writing tests are analyzed item by item and the scores of the correct responses as well as the wrong responses are converted into percentage forms. The findings revealed that students have difficulty in remembering and grasping the grammatical restrictions that control the use of English quantifiers specifically MANY; mother tongue also affects the use of quantifiers by some NCE1 students to the extent that they use one word to represent about three or four English quantifiers. The causes of difficulty in the use of English quantifiers by the students are attributed to poor background and inadequate use of English language and quantifiers, because we cannot use quantifiers alone and get the desired meaning without putting them in a sentence.

Keywords: academic writing, English quantifiers, grammatical restrictions, tertiary institution students

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Authors: Chek K. Loi

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The present study has two objectives. Firstly, it investigates the rhetorical strategies employed in the body paragraphs of ESL (English as a Second Language) undergraduate students’ English academic essays. Peacock’s (2002) model of the discussion section was used as the starting points in this study to investigate the rhetorical moves employed in the data. Secondly, it investigates the writing problems as perceived by these ESL students through an interview. Interview responses serve as accompanying data to the move analysis. Apart from this, students’ English academic writing problems are diagnosed. The findings have pedagogical implications in an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) classroom.

Keywords: academic essays, move analysis, pedagogical implication, rhetorical strategies

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Authors: Clement Ndoricimpa

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The expression of stance is highly expected in writing at tertiary level. Through a selection of linguistic and rhetorical elements, writers express commitment, critical distance and build a critically discerning reader in texts. Despite many studies on patterns of stance in students’ academic writing, little may not be known about how English as a Foreign Language students learns to build a critically discerning reader in their texts. Therefore, this study examines patterns of stance in essays written by students majoring in business administration at English-medium University in Burundi as part of classroom assignments. It draws on systemic functional linguistics to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively the data. The quantitative analysis is used to identify the differences in frequency of stance patterns in the essays. The results show a significant difference in the use of boosters by lower- and upper-level students. Lower-level students’ writing contains more boosters and many idiosyncratic sentence structures than do upper-level students’ writing, and upper-level students’ essays contain more hedging and few grammatical mistakes than do lower-level students’ essays. No significant difference in the use of attitude markers and concessive and contrastive expressions. Students in lower- and upper-level do not use attitude markers and disclaimer markers appropriately and accurately. These findings suggest that students should be taught the use of stance patterns in academic writing.

Keywords: academic writing, metadiscourse, stance, student corpora

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Authors: Sandra Figueiredo, Margarida Alves Martins, Carlos Silva, Cristina Simões

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This study integrates a larger research empirical project that examines second language (SL) learners’ profiles and valid procedures to perform complete and diagnostic assessment in schools. 102 learners of Portuguese as a SL aged 7 and 17 years speakers of distinct home languages were assessed in several linguistic tasks. In this article, we focused on writing performance in the specific task of narrative essay composition. The written outputs were measured using the score in six components adapted from an English SL assessment context (Alberta Education): linguistic vocabulary, grammar, syntax, strategy, socio-linguistic, and discourse. The writing processes and strategies in Portuguese language used by different immigrant students were analysed to determine features and diversity of deficits on authentic texts performed by SL writers. Differentiated performance was based on the diversity of the following variables: grades, previous schooling, home language, instruction in first language, and exposure to Portuguese as Second Language. Indo-Aryan languages speakers showed low writing scores compared to their peers and the type of language and respective cognitive mapping (such as Mandarin and Arabic) was the predictor, not linguistic distance. Home language instruction should also be prominently considered in further research to understand specificities of cognitive academic profile in a Romance languages learning context. Additionally, this study also examined the teachers representations that will be here addressed to understand educational implications of second language teaching in psychological distress of different minorities in schools of specific host countries.

Keywords: home language, immigrant students, Portuguese language, second language, writing assessment

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Authors: Seyed Yasin Yazdi-Amirkhiz, Azirah Hashim

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This study purported to comparatively investigate the influence of collaborative writing on the quality of individual writing of four female Iranian and four female Malaysian students. The first semester students at a private university in Malaysia, who were homogeneous in terms of age, gender, study discipline, and language proficiency, were divided into two Iranian and two Malaysian dyads. The dyads performed collaborative writing tasks for 15 sessions; after three consecutive collaborative writing sessions, each participant was asked to individually attempt a writing task. Both collaborative and individual writing tasks comprised isomorphic graphic prompts (IELTS Academic Module task 1). Writing quality of the five individually-produced texts during the study was scored in terms of task achievement (TA), cohesion/coherence (C/C), grammatical range/accuracy (GR/A), and lexical resources (LR). The findings indicated a hierarchy of development in TA and C/C among all the students, while LR showed minor improvement only among three of Malaysian students, and GR/A barely exhibited any progress among all the participants. Intermittent progressions and regressions were also discerned in the trajectory of their writing development. The findings are discussed in the light of the socio-cultural and emergentist perspectives, the typology of tasks used as well as the role of the participants’ level of language proficiency.

Keywords: collaborative writing, writing quality, individual writing, collaboration

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Authors: Clare Cunningham

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Whilst there is a strong global research base on the benefits of structured writing retreats and similar provisions, such as Shut Up and Write events, for academic staff and postgraduate researchers, very little has been published about the worth of such events for undergraduate students. This is despite the fact that, internationally, undergraduate student researchers experience similar pressures, distractions and feelings towards writing as those who are at more senior levels within the academy. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study with cohorts of third-year undergraduate students over the course of four academic years. This involved a range of research instruments adopted over the four years of the study. They include the administration of four questionnaires across three academic years, a collection of ethnographic recordings in the second year, and the collation of reflective journal entries and evaluations from all four years. The final two years of data collection took place during the period of Covid-19 restrictions when writing retreats moved to the virtual space which adds an additional dimension of interest to the analysis. The analysis involved the collation of quantitative questionnaire data to observe patterns in expressions of attitudes towards writing. Qualitative data were analysed thematically and used to corroborate and support the quantitative data when appropriate. The resulting data confirmed that one of the biggest challenges for undergraduate students mirrors those reported in the findings of studies focused on more experienced researchers. This is not surprising, especially given the number of undergraduate students who now work alongside their studies, as well as the increasing number who have caring responsibilities, but it has, as yet, been under-reported. The data showed that the groups of writing retreat participants all had very positive experiences, with accountability, a sense of community and procrastination avoidance some of the key aspects. The analysis revealed the sometimes transformative power of these events for a number of these students in terms of changing the way they viewed writing and themselves as writers. The data presented in this talk will support the proposal that retreats should much more widely be offered to undergraduate students across the world.

Keywords: academic writing, students, undergraduates, writing retreat

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Authors: Heba I. Bakry

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Academic writing in the tertiary education has always been a challenge to EFL learners. This proposed study aims at investigating the academic English language needs for PhD students and candidates studying humanities and social sciences at Cairo University. The research problem arises from the fact that most of them study English as a Foreign Language (EFL) or for specific purposes (ESP) in their undergraduate years. They are hardly familiarized with the different academic genres, despite the fact that they use academic resources written in English, and they are required to publish a paper internationally. Upon understanding the conventions and constraints of academic writing, postgraduates will have the opportunity to interact with the international academic spheres conveniently. There is, thus, a need to be acquainted with the generally accepted features of the academic genres, such as academic papers and their part-genres, such as writing abstracts, in addition to other occluded genres, such as personal statements and recommendation letters. The lack of practicing many of these genres is caused by the fact that there are clear differences between the rhetoric and conventions of the students' native language, i.e., Arabic, and the target language they are learning in the academic context, i.e., English. Moreover, apart from the general culture represented ethno-linguistically, the learners' 'small' culture represented in a national setting like Cairo University is more defining than their general cultural affiliations that are associated with their nationality, race, or religion, for instance. The main research question of this proposed study is: What is the effect of teaching a genre-based EAP course on the research writing competence of PhD candidates? To reach an answer to this question, the study will attempt to answer the following sub-questions: 1. What are the Egyptian PhD candidates' EAP perceived needs? 2. What are the requisite academic research skills for Egyptian scholars? The study intends to assess the students’ needs, as a step to design and evaluate an EAP course that is based on explaining and scrutinizing a variety of academic genres. Adopting a diagnostic approach, the needs assessment uses quantitative data collected through questionnaires, and qualitative data assembled from semi-structured interviews with the students and their teachers, in addition to non-participant observations of a convenience sample.

Keywords: course design, English for academic purposes, genre-based, needs assessment

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Authors: Tahira Zaman

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The paper intends to discover the utility of hybrid teaching methods to aid undergraduate students to improve their English academic writing skills. A total of 45 undergraduate students were selected randomly from three classes from varying language abilities, with the research design of monitoring and rubrics evaluation as a means of measure. Language skills of the students were upgraded with the help of experiential learning methods using reflective writing technique, guided method in which students were merely directed to correct form of writing techniques along with self-guided method for the students to produce a library research-based article measured through a standardized rubrics provided. The progress of the students was monitored and checked through rubrics and self-evaluation and concluded that a change was observed in the students’ writing abilities.

Keywords: self evaluation, hybrid, self evaluation, reflective writing

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Authors: Antoniette Belle R. Bontuyan

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The aim of the study was to determine the levels of performance in Composition Writing of English 122: Writing in the Discipline of the Associate in Hospitality Management Freshman Students in relation to their reading and writing experiences at the Cebu Technological University Tuburan Campus, Academic Year 2009-2010 as basis for a proposed skill exercises. Specifically, this research answers the following questions: Firstly, based on the students’ written compositions, what the students’ levels of performance in the following are: Composition Topic with subcomponents of Topic Development, Organizational or Logical Conclusions, Accurate, Relevant Evidence or Detail, Voice/Tone/Style, and the Composition Conventions with subcomponents of Structure, Grammar and Usage, Spelling, Capitalization, Punctuation. Secondly, what the students’ extents of experiences in view of Writing and Reading Experiences are.

Keywords: COMPOSITION WRITING

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Authors: Jingjie Li, Wenjie Hu

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Phraseological units in academic English texts have been a central focus in recent corpus linguistic research. A wide variety of phraseological units have been explored, including collocations, chunks, lexical bundles, patterns, semantic sequences, etc. This paper describes a special category of clause-level phraseological units, namely, Characteristic Sentence Stems (CSSs), with a view to describing their defining criteria and extraction method. CSSs are contiguous lexico-grammatical sequences which contain a subject-predicate structure and which are frame expressions characteristic of academic writing. The extraction of CSSs consists of six steps: Part-of-speech tagging, n-gram segmentation, structure identification, significance of occurrence calculation, text range calculation, and overlapping sequence reduction. Significance of occurrence calculation is the crux of this study. It includes the computing of both the internal association and the boundary independence of a CSS and tests the occurring significance of the CSS from both inside and outside perspectives. A new normalization algorithm is also introduced into the calculation of LocalMaxs for reducing overlapping sequences. It is argued that many sentence stems are so recurrent in academic texts that the most typical of them have become the habitual ways of making meaning in academic writing. Therefore, studies of CSSs could have potential implications and reference value for academic discourse analysis, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and writing.

Keywords: characteristic sentence stem, extraction method, phraseological unit, the statistical measure

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Authors: Manssour Habbash, Srinivasa Rao Idapalapati

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Although writing is a multifaceted task, teaching writing is a demanding task basically for two reasons: Grammar and Syntax. This article provides a method of teaching writing that was found to be effective in improving students’ academic writing composition skill. The article explains the concepts of ‘guided-discovery’ and ‘guided-construction’ upon which a method of teaching writing is grounded and developed. Providing a brief commentary on what the core could mean primarily, the article presents an exposition of understanding and identifying the core and building upon the core that can demonstrate the way a teacher can make use of the concepts in teaching for improving the writing skills of their students. The method is an adaptation of grammar translation method that has been improvised to suit to a student-centered classroom environment. An intervention of teaching writing through this method was tried out with positive outcomes in formal classroom research setup, and in view of the content’s quality that relates more to the classroom practices and also in consideration of its usefulness to the practicing teachers the process and the findings are presented in a narrative form along with the results in tabular form.

Keywords: core of a text, guided construction, guided discovery, theme of a text

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Authors: Jamie Sundvall, Lisa Jennings

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A decline in writing skills and abilities of students entering graduate school has become a focus for university systems within the United States. This decline has become a national trend that requires reflection on the intervention strategies used to address the deficit and unintended consequences as outcomes in the profession. Social work faculty is challenged to increase written scholarship within the academic setting. However, when a large number of students in each course have writing deficits, there is a shift from focus on content, ability to demonstrate competency, and application of core social work concepts. This qualitative study focuses on the experiences of online faculty who support increasing scholarship through writing and are following best practices preparing students academically to see improvements in written presentation in classroom work. This study outlines best practices to improve written academic presentation, especially in an online setting. The research also highlights how a student’s ability to show competency and application of concepts may be overlooked in the online setting. This can lead to new social workers who are prepared academically, but may unable to effectively advocate and document thought presentation in their writing. The intended progression of writing across all levels of higher education moves from summary, to application, and into abstract problem solving. Initial findings indicate that it is important to reflect on practices used to address writing deficits in terms of academic writing, competency, and application. It is equally important to reflect on how these methods of intervention impact a student post-graduation. Specifically, for faculty, it is valuable to assess a social worker’s ability to engage in continuity of documentation and advocacy at micro, mezzo, macro, and international levels of practice.

Keywords: intervention, professional impact, scholarship, writing

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Authors: Jingwen Ou

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Writing for academic purposes in a second or foreign language is one of the most important and the most demanding skills to be mastered by non-native speakers. Traditionally, the EAP writing instruction at the tertiary level encompasses the teaching of academic genre knowledge, more specifically, the disciplinary writing conventions, the rhetorical functions, and specific linguistic features. However, one of the main sources of challenges in English academic writing for L2 students at the tertiary level can still be found in proficiency in academic discourse, especially vocabulary, academic register, and organization. Data-Driven Learning (DDL) is defined as “a pedagogical approach featuring direct learner engagement with corpus data”. In the past two decades, the rising popularity of the application of the data-driven learning (DDL) approach in the field of EAP writing teaching has been noticed. Such a combination has not only transformed traditional pedagogy aided by published DDL guidebooks in classroom use but also triggered global research on corpus use in EAP classrooms. This study endeavors to delineate a systematic review of research in the intersection of DDL and EAP writing instruction by conducting a systematic literature review on both indirect and direct DDL practice in EAP writing instructional settings in China. Furthermore, the review provides a synthesis of significant discoveries emanating from prior research investigations concerning Chinese university students’ perception of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) and the subsequent impact on their academic writing performance following corpus-based training. Research papers were selected from Scopus-indexed journals and core journals from two main Chinese academic databases (CNKI and Wanfang) published in both English and Chinese over the last ten years based on keyword searches. Results indicated an insufficiency of empirical DDL research despite a noticeable upward trend in corpus research on discourse analysis and indirect corpus applications for material design by language teachers. Research on the direct use of corpora and corpus tools in DDL, particularly in combination with genre-based EAP teaching, remains a relatively small fraction of the whole body of research in Chinese higher education settings. Such scarcity is highly related to the prevailing absence of systematic training in English academic writing registers within most Chinese universities' EAP syllabi due to the Chinese English Medium Instruction policy, where only English major students are mandated to submit English dissertations. Findings also revealed that Chinese learners still held mixed attitudes towards corpus tools influenced by learner differences, limited access to language corpora, and insufficient pre-training on corpus theoretical concepts, despite their improvements in final academic writing performance.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, data-driven learning, EAP, tertiary education in China

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Authors: Lucia Rottava

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The present study focuses on academic literacy and addresses the impact of semantic-discursive resources on the constitution of genres that are produced in such context. The research considers the development of writing in the academic context in Portuguese. Researches that address academic literacy and the characteristics of the texts produced in this context are rare, mainly with focus on the development of writing, considering three variables: the constitution of the writer, the perception of the reader/interlocutor and the organization of the informational text flow. The research aims to map the semantic-discursive resources of the written register in texts of several genres and produced by students in the first semester of the undergraduate course in letters. The hypothesis raised is that writing in the academic environment is not a recurrent literacy practice for these learners and can be explained by the ontogenetic and phylogenetic nature of language development. Qualitative in nature, the present research has as empirical data texts produced in a half-yearly course of Reading and Textual Production; these data result from the proposition of four different writing proposals, in a total of 600 texts. The corpus is analyzed based on semantic-discursive resources, seeking to contemplate relevant aspects of language (grammar, discourse and social context) that reveal the choices made in the reader/writer interrelationship and the organizational flow of the text. Among the semantic-discursive resources, the analysis includes three resources, including (a) appraisal and negotiation to understand the attitudes negotiated (roles of the participants of the discourse and their relationship with the other); (b) ideation to explain the construction of the experience (activities performed and participants); and (c) periodicity to outline the flow of information in the organization of the text according to the genre it instantiates. The results indicate the organizational difficulties of the flow of the text information. Cartography contributes to the understanding of the way writers use language in an effort to present themselves, evaluate someone else’s work, and communicate with readers.

Keywords: academic writing, portuguese mother tongue, semantic-discursive resources, sistemic funcional linguistic

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Authors: Mehran Memari, Bita Asadi

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Second language (L2) classrooms in academic contexts usually consist of learners with diverse L2 proficiency levels. One solution for managing such heterogeneous classes and addressing individual needs of students is to improve learner autonomy by using technological innovations such as blogging. The focus of this study is on investigating the effects of blogging on improving the quality of Iranian university students' writings. For this aim, twenty-six Iranian university students participated in the study. Students in the experimental group (n=13) were required to blog daily while the students in the control group (n=13) were asked to write a daily schedule using paper and pencil. After a 3-month period of instruction, the five last writings of the students from both groups were rated by two experienced raters. Also, students' attitudes toward the traditional method and blogging were surveyed using a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The research results showed evidences in favor of the students who used blogging in their writing program. Also, although students in the experimental group found blogging more demanding than the traditional method, they showed an overall positive attitude toward the use of blogging as a way of improving their writing skills. The findings of the study have implications for the incorporation of computer-assisted learning in L2 academic contexts.

Keywords: blogging, computer-assisted learning, paper and pencil, writing

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Authors: Yael Leibovitch

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Teaching academic writing is a source of concern for secondary schools. Many students struggle to meet the basic standards of literacy while teacher confidence in this arena remains low. These issues are compounded by the conventionally prescriptive character of writing instruction, which fails to engage student writers. At the same time, a growing body of research on dialogic teaching has highlighted the powerful role of talk in student learning. With the intent of enhancing pedagogical capability, this paper shares finding from a co-inquiry case study that investigated how teachers think about and negotiate classroom discourse to position students as effective academic writers and thinkers. Using a range of qualitative methods, this project closely documents the iterative collaboration of educators as they sought to create more opportunities for dialogic engagement. More specifically, it triangulates both teacher and student data regarding the efficacy of interdependent thinking and collaborative reasoning as organizing principals for literacy learning. Findings indicate that a dialogic teaching repertoire helps to develop the cognitive and metacognitive skills of adolescent writers. In addition, they underscore the importance of sustained professional collaboration to the uptake of new writing pedagogies.

Keywords: dialogic teaching, writing, teacher professional development, student literacy

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Authors: Tanzeela Anbreen, Ammara Maqsood

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Reading into writing is one of university students' most required academic skills. The current study explored postgraduate university students’ writing quality using a corpus-based approach. Twelve postgraduate students’ literature review essays were chosen for the corpus-based analysis. These essays were chosen because students had to incorporate multiple reading sources in these essays, which was a new writing exercise for them. The students were provided feedback at least two times which comprised of the written comments by the tutor highlighting the areas of improvement and also by using the ‘track changes’ function. This exercise was repeated two times, and students submitted two drafts. This investigation included only the finally submitted work of the students. A corpus-based approach was adopted to analyse the essays because it promotes autonomous discovery and personalised learning. The aim of this analysis was to understand the existing level of students’ writing before the start of their postgraduate thesis. Text Inspector was used to analyse the quality of essays. With the help of the Text Inspector tool, the vocabulary used in the essays was compared to the English Vocabulary Profile (EVP), which describes what learners know and can do at each Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) level. Writing quality was also measured for the Flesch reading ease score, which is a standard to describe the ease of understanding the writing content. The results reflected that students found writing essays using multiple sources challenging. In most essays, the vocabulary level achieved was between B1-B2 of the CEFL level. The study recommends that students need extensive training in developing academic writing skills, particularly in writing the literature review type assignment, which requires multiple sources citations.

Keywords: literature review essays, postgraduate students, corpus-based analysis, vocabulary proficiency

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Authors: kaveh Jalilzadeh, Maryam Rastgari

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Motivation for learning a foreign language is needed for learners of any foreign language to effectively learn language skills. However, there are some factors that lead to the learners’ demotivation. Therefore, teachers of foreign languages, most notably English language which turned out to be an international language for academic and business purposes, need to be well aware of the demotivation sources and know how to reduce learners’ demotivation. This study is an attempt to explore demotivation-reducing strategies employed by Turkish EFL learners in L2 writing. The researchers used a qualitative case study and employed semi-structured interviews to collect data. The informants recruited in this study were 20 English writing lecturers who were selected through purposive sampling among university lecturers/instructors at the state and non-state universities in Istanbul and Ankara. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, and MAXQDA software (version 2022) was used for performing coding and thematic analysis of the data. Findings revealed that Turkish EFL teachers use 18 strategies to reduce language learners’ demotivation. The most frequently reported strategies were: writing in a group, writing about interesting topics, writing about new topics, writing about familiar topics, writing about simple topics, and writing about relevant topics. The findings have practical implications for writing teachers and learners of the English language.

Keywords: phenomenological study, emotional vulnerability, motivation, digital Settings

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Authors: Jeong-Won Lee, Kyeong-Ok Yoon

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The current study aimed to investigate the effects of topic familiarity and language proficiency on linguistic aspects (lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, accuracy, and fluency) in EFL learners’ argumentative essays. For the study 64 college students were asked to write an argumentative essay for the two different topics (Driving and Smoking) chosen by the consideration of topic familiarity. The students were divided into two language proficiency groups (high-level and intermediate) according to their English writing proficiency. The findings of the study are as follows: 1) the participants of this study exhibited lower levels of lexical and syntactic complexity as well as accuracy when performing writing tasks with unfamiliar topics; and 2) they demonstrated the use of a wider range of vocabulary, and longer and more complex structures, and produced accurate and lengthier texts compared to their intermediate peers. Discussion and pedagogical implications for instruction of writing classes in EFL contexts were addressed.

Keywords: topic familiarity, complexity, accuracy, fluency

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Authors: Svetlana Strinyuk, Viacheslav Lanin

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Academic English has become lingua franca for international scientific community which stimulates universities to introduce English for Specific Purposes (EAP) courses into curriculum. Teaching L2 EAP students might be fulfilled with corpus technologies and digital stylistics. A special software developed to reach the manifold task of teaching, assessing and researching academic writing of L2 students on basis of digital stylistics and multidimensional analysis was created. A set of annotations (style markers) – grammar, lexical and syntactic features most significant of academic writing was built. Contrastive comparison of two corpora “model corpus”, subject domain limited papers published by competent writers in leading academic journals, and “students’ corpus”, subject domain limited papers written by last year students allows to receive data about the features of academic writing underused or overused by L2 EAP student. Both corpora are tagged with a special software created in GATE Developer. Style markers within the framework of research might be replaced depending on the relevance and validity of the result which is achieved from research corpora. Thus, selecting relevant (high frequency) style markers and excluding less relevant, i.e. less frequent annotations, high validity of the model is achieved. Software allows to compare the data received from processing model corpus to students’ corpus and get reports which can be used in teaching and assessment. The less deviation from the model corpus students demonstrates in their writing the higher is academic writing skill acquisition. The research showed that several style markers (hedging devices) were underused by L2 EAP students whereas lexical linking devices were used excessively. A special software implemented into teaching of EAP courses serves as a successful visual aid, makes assessment more valid; it is indicative of the degree of writing skill acquisition, and provides data for further research.

Keywords: corpus technologies in EAP teaching, multidimensional analysis, GATE Developer, corpus stylistics

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Authors: Farhad Ghorbandordinejad, Shamsoddin Aref

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Wikis and blogs, defined as educational tools in line with the objectives of collaborative writing, are regarded as innovative ways of writing addressing the problems of conventional types of writing. Although writing in wikis and blogs step in different contexts, they are both aiming at betterment of collaborative writing procedures. It is believed that due to certain reasons bringing in wikis and blogs to learners' life can lead to better performance of writing. This study aimed at dipping into pedagogical aspects of wikis and blogs in the hope of eliminating prior traditional mistakes and bringing students together in a more constructive L2 context. To this end, three groups of intermediate students were experimented in three settings of wiki-group, blog-group and conventional (control) group. Despite conventional group learners, participants in both experimental groups experienced L2 writing in a new telecollaborative context. An achievement test was administered after the treatment to check learners’ degree of improvement in EFL writing. The results of this study provide a deep insight towards the effectiveness of writing in the contexts of wikis and blogs compared with conventional writing procedures. The overall conclusion drawn from the distinction of conventional writing, on one hand, and wikis and blogs, on the other hand, indicates that the latter channels of writing are more constructive for learners’ writing improvements.

Keywords: collaborative writing, wikis, blogs, writing achievement

Procedia PDF Downloads 368