Good communication skills are a requirement for all professionals. As for engineers, it seems that writing is one of the most important communication skills to help them to be successful in their professional life. However, many engineering students are poor in writing. Numerous studies havebeen conducted to determine the effectiveness of the different methods used to develop the writing skills of language learners, including the genre-based framework. The present study aims at examining the writing achievement of Thai engineering students receiving writing instruction through the explicit genre-based approach, or GBA (SFL genre), and their attitudes toward this method of teaching. The participants were 28 fourth-year engineering students enrolled in a basic writing course. One lesson in teaching writing recounts was provided during three sessions. The results of a T-test revealed clear improvement in the students’ writing ability after attending the lesson. Regarding the attitudes of the students, the findings were crosschecked with the students’ responses to the questionnaire, to the interview questions, and in their journal. It was found that the students had a satisfactory attitude toward this teaching method. Based on the study findings, it is recommended that language teachers incorporate the knowledge of genre, genre analysis, and schematic features of a particular genre in their teaching in order to enhance their students’ writing proficiency and confidence.
Good communication skills are a requirement for all professionals. As for engineers, it seems that writing is one of the most important communication skills to help them to be successful in their professional life. However, many engineering students are poor in writing. Numerous studies havebeen conducted to determine the effectiveness of the different methods used to develop the writing skills of language learners, including the genre-based framework. The present study aims at examining the writing achievement of Thai engineering students receiving writing instruction through the explicit genre-based approach, or GBA (SFL genre), and their attitudes toward this method of teaching. The participants were 28 fourth-year engineering students enrolled in a basic writing course. One lesson in teaching writing recounts was provided during three sessions. The results of a T-test revealed clear improvement in the students' writing ability after attending the lesson. Regarding the attitudes of the students, the findings were crosschecked with the students' responses to the questionnaire, to the interview questions, and in their journal. It was found that the students had a satisfactory attitude toward this teaching method. Based on the study findings, it is recommended that language teachers incorporate the knowledge of genre, genre analysis, and schematic features of a particular genre in their teaching in order to enhance their students' writing proficiency and confidence.
Meetings are one of the common activities that play an important role in the field of business. For the community of Thai engineers, meetings become the salient aspects of their work, and therefore the effective writing of minutes of meetings is required. As such a writing is essential in the field, analyzing the corpus of the minutes of meetings would shed a light the patterns of meaning instantiated through those minutes. A corpus of 115 minutes of meetings were collected and analyzed using the genre analysis framework (moves and steps) of Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993), and Thaweewong (2006). Further, the lexico-grammatical features e.g., tenses and voices instantiated through the meetings were examined. Results of the analysis showed that Thai engineers use e-mail as the medium in writing the minutes in two ways: using regular e-mail messages (e-mail form) and using the company form. In terms of moves, there were seven common moves observed in the writing of the minutes: (1) the heading; (2) an opening salutation; (3) establishing a correspondence chain; (4) the content of the meeting; (5) a closing correspondence chain; (6) a closing salutation; and (7) attaching a document. In terms of lexicogrammar, there are some prominent features such as the simple present tense, active voice, noun phrases, proper nouns, abbreviations, and key word lists. The results above can be further utilized by course designers when developing the materials for their course. It is expected that the knowledge of moves and lexico-gramamtical features can help engineering students and novice engineers practice writing the minutes of meetings effectively.
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