Developing literature review writing and citation practices through an online writing tutorial series: Corpus-based evidence

Abstract

Writing a literature review (LR) in English can be a daunting task for non-native English-speaking graduate students due to the complexities of this academic genre. To help graduate students raise genre awareness and develop LR writing skills, a five-unit online tutorial series was designed and implemented at a large university in Canada. The tutorial focuses on the following features of the LR genre: logical structure, academic vocabulary, syntax, as well as citation practices. Each tutorial unit includes an interactive e-book with explanations, examples, quizzes, and an individual or collaborative LR writing assignment. Twenty-nine non-native English-speaking graduate students from various institutions participated in the tutorials and completed five writing tasks. This study reports on their developmental trajectories in writing performance in terms of cohesion, lexical features, syntactic features, and citation practices as shown in three individual writing tasks. Corpus-based analyses indicate that noticeable, often non-linear, changes are observed in several features (e.g., use of connectives, range and frequency of academic vocabulary) across the participants' writing samples. Meanwhile, citation analysis shows a steady increase in the use of integral citations in the participants' writing samples, as measured with occurrence by the number of sentences, along with a more diverse use of reporting verbs and hedges in their final writing samples. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Assessment of Academic ESL Writing in an Online Tutorial for Graduate Students

“…In a recent study on literature writing development from the same project, Li et al (2023) performed corpusbased analyses on the literature writing samples completed by English L2 graduate students in an online writing tutorial series. Their analysis results showed that the writing samples produced at later stages of the tutorial series as compared to the beginning were stronger in certain linguistic features such as the use of connectives (e.g., 'so' and 'because') and academic vocabulary, while other linguistic features (e.g., syntactic complexity and global cohesion) remained at similar levels The learners in the above study also performed better in citation practices, employing more citations and diverse reporting verbs.…”

“…Their analysis results showed that the writing samples produced at later stages of the tutorial series as compared to the beginning were stronger in certain linguistic features such as the use of connectives (e.g., 'so' and 'because') and academic vocabulary, while other linguistic features (e.g., syntactic complexity and global cohesion) remained at similar levels The learners in the above study also performed better in citation practices, employing more citations and diverse reporting verbs. This study builds on Li et al (2023) to further investigate other assessment types to examine the effectiveness of the same online writing tutorial series, which is described in the next subsection.…”

“…Writing a literature review in academic English is a common but daunting task for both English as first language (L1) and as second language (L2) writers (Badenhorst, 2018;Li et al, 2023;Shi and Dong, 2015). What may make this task even more challenging is a lack of local or institutional support in English for academic purposes (EAP) due to limited resources that could be channelled into writing support., In addition, in research, there are few studies on standalone or supplementary resources designed to help English L2 graduate students develop literature review writing skills (Storch and Tapper, 2009).…”

“…As a part of a larger project, this paper reports the development of an online writing tutorial series at a Canadian university and an evaluation of its effectiveness from the perspective of expert assessment of writing samples and participant self-assessment. The results of assessment analyses are then discussed in light of the findings of Li, Makarova, and Wang (2023), a relevant corpus-based study of the same group of writing samples.…”

“…First, the paper describes the tools employed in the tutorial construction: MoodleCloud platform, H5P interactive e-book designed by the authors, surveys, and assessment tools. Second, we present and compare assessment tools employed to evaluate learners' writing progress: Expert assessment with an analytic rubric, self-assessments of progress by the participants, and automated text analysis with corpus-based tools as reported in Li, Makarova, and Wang (2023). A comparison of the scores across the three assessment tools shows some discrepancies, which seems to suggest that combined tools yield a more comprehensive picture.…”