The Effectiveness of Using an H5P Pathway to Enhance College Students' Academic Style in Writing

Abstract

This study investigates the effectiveness of using an H5P pathway to enhance college students' academic style in writing. The study was conducted at XJTLU, a Sino-foreign university, where the language barriers of first-year students posed difficulties in their transition from informal language to the formal tone required in academic writing. Through a careful experimental design, participants were assigned to either an experimental or a control group, with the former engaging in a structured H5P pathway including five specific academic writing style rules based on learner needs analysis. The five rules are in aspects of word choice, sentence structure, transition, hedging and redundancy. The latter received lesson PPTs with the same content. This paper discusses the results of the study, which show that the application of the H5P pathway effectively assisted Year 1 students at XJTLU in narrowing the gap between the two writing styles. Preliminary analysis indicates a significant improvement in the experimental group's academic writing style specifically in aspects of using formal words and complex sentence structure. By comparison, other than word choice, there is no significant improvement in the control group. The findings of this study highlight the potential of H5P pathways as an effective tool for enhancing college students' academic writing style. Through interactive and tailored activities, students’ challenges at academic writing conventions could be addressed. This research provides implications for innovative pedagogical strategies that can promote students' academic development.