Basic English Writing (BEW) courses have been part of English learning curricula in many universities. Some research has been conducted to investigate various class designs for English language courses. However, class designs for English writing are not yet abundantly developed to provide more experimental results. The purpose of this study was to experiment with a class design in accordance with a student-orient textbook. It explored the learning effect of beginning writers who participated in an experiment of the student-oriented class design and textbook. Participants included native Chinese seniors, taking Basic English Writing (BEW) classes. They were intermediate level students in terms of English proficiency. The study was conducted with two groups and it lasted 18 weeks. The two groups were evaluated by a final writing test. The final writing test was analyzed with four variables included in text analysis and an untried variable included in grammar. The results indicated that the class design helped the participants learn basic writing skills and apply them more frequently in their compositions at the end of the experiment. This design and textbook may be an easier and more systematic teaching strategy for BEW teachers.
Course designs for Basic English Writing classes vary from one course to another. The objective of this study was to investigate the semantic misinterpretation of English words found in the English compositions written by native-Chinese-speaking undergraduate students and to overcome if such a barrier occurred in the process of writing. First, this study made use of both linguistic and literary theories in an attempt of exemplifying the existence of the translation and semantic misinterpretation adopted by undergraduate students when writing in English. This hypothesis could be proved by the detached relation between the sign and the referent, or in Saussures terminology, between the signifier and the signified, in particular in translating from Chinese into English. This study included an experimental course structure, which consisted of some feasible teaching methods. These methods were applied to Basic English Writing classes investigated in the present study. They were dictionary-consulting activities, team discussions (brainstorming as a team), sentence-making activities in which signal words were used, and team writing activities, in order to improve the students writing skills and his or her vocabulary size. Test instruments included a pretest (pre-class questionnaires) and a posttest (a midterm writing test). Targeted students were Chinese non-English majors taking Basic English Writing (BEW) classes. The students in the treatment group performed better in the posttest than those in the control group. Moreover, the students, who failed to get into the habit of consulting English dictionaries, did not perform better than those consistently consulting English dictionaries. It seems that the experimental course structure may facilitate university students learning of how to write in English.
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