The development of ESL students’ synthesis writing through reading instruction

Abstract

Synthesis writing, or discourse synthesis, is important in university contexts and has received increasing attention in research on academic writing. Synthesis is challenging because it involves using both reading and writing skills to integrate information from source texts. Although previous research has found that writing instruction leads to improvement in synthesis writing, no studies have investigated the effect of reading instruction. The current study investigates the effect of reading instruction on synthesis writing among learners of English as a second language. Participants were students in two in-tact high-intermediate writing classes in an intensive English program at a US university. Participants were assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. Both received the same synthesis writing instruction. The control group received standard reading instruction focusing on comprehending individual texts, while the experimental group received reading instruction focusing on making connections between the texts. Quantitative results indicated that the two groups improved similarly; however, qualitative results using the Appraisal framework from Systemic Functional Linguistics found that the experimental group more explicitly acknowledged information from the source texts, connected the two source texts with each other, and connected ideas from the source texts with the student author's own position.