This study aims to investigate the usefulness of a deductive-cum-process writing approach to raise native Cantonese-speaking ESL students’ awareness of the inappropriate use of informal language in academic writing. Achieving tone formality by incorporating appropriate syntactic and semantic elements poses great difficulties to freshmen at the City University of Hong Kong. Furthermore, the effectiveness of using a deductive approach to teach word usage has been inconclusive despite numerous studies on this issue (e.g., Alzubi, 2015; Tammenga-Helmantel, 2014; Vogel et al., 2011). In the current study, seven types of informal language expressions and corresponding formal alternatives were first taught, followed by peer review and individual teacher-student consultations to reinforce the teaching.The experimental group consisted of 19 students taking an academic writing course in the summer semester 2017-2018. The end-of-course writing examination showed that the experimental group used significantly fewer informal expressions than did the control group in three measures—the total number of informal expressions and two component measures (p?0.05). Questionnaire findings confirmed the usefulness of the current teaching approach, as perceived by the majority of the participants. Qualitative analysis revealed several types of informal expressions that were most difficult for the participants to identify and to make correction.
This research aims to investigate the effects of two teaching sequences – interleaving and blocking – on the participants’ use of three types of cohesive devices (conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs and prepositions [thereafter CCPs]) in their argumentative essays. The participants included 50 native Cantonese-speaking university students taking an academic writing course. Interleaving refers to the teaching sequence in which learners practice several skills at one time whereas in blocking only one skill is practiced at one time.Prior to essay writing, participants were taught CCPs using sentence transformation. One class was taught using interleaving and the other blocking. The first and the second drafts of the argumentative essay served as pre-and post-tests. The total numbers of CCPs used correctly both syntactically and semantically in their argumentative essays were counted for the pre-tests and post-tests for both groups. Results of Paired Samples and Independent t-tests suggest that neither of the two teaching sequences was more effective than the other in raising the participants’ total instances of CCPs; however, blocking appears to be more effective in boosting the use of prepositions as linking words. Sentence transformation, whether administered in the interleaved or blocked sequence, was considered to have served the teaching purpose of providing an opportunity for the students to engage in serious thinking about the semantic relationship between two given sentences.
Different approaches have been used to teach EFL students summary writing, including a genre-based approach (Chen & Su, 2012), implementing key words and question generation (Chou, 2012), and automatic scaffolding and concept mapping (Yang, 2015). This study aims to explore the effectiveness of another approach – one that might be more appropriate to the participants in this study – using generalizing words (such as “solutions” and “difficulty”). Such words were intended to help students visualize the macro-structure of a passage. In the first phase of this approach, a template containing generalizing words was provided to students to guide them in finding the main points of the passage. In the second phase, students were expected to generate generalizing words themselves. Students were also taught how to achieve paragraph coherence by making use of the generalizing words produced. The experimental group scored slightly higher marks in three measures (i.e., Idea Flow, Paraphrasing Techniques and Total Score) than did the control group in the end-of-course summary writing examination, though the differences were not significant at the 95% confidence level. Questionnaire findings revealed the difficulties perceived by participants in completing a summary task and the ways in which this approach had helped them.
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