Scaffolding analytical argumentative writing in a design class: A corpus analysis of student writing

Abstract

We report on an interdisciplinary collaboration between writing professors with training in linguistics and a design professor at an English-medium university in the Middle East, where the majority of the students have English as an additional language. We briefly describe the iterative process of redesigning the writing assignments and designing writing workshops to make the design professor's expectations more explicit. We then investigate the impact of the explicit instruction and writing workshops on students’ writing. We use a corpus-based tool to compare the writing of students who participated in the workshops to that of students who took the course in a previous semester, when the workshops were not offered. Our analysis points to an improvement in student writing as a result of the disciplinary writing workshops, particularly in the use of linguistic resources to write analytically.