The Effectiveness of Explicit Instruction on Student Writers' Academic Writing : A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of explicit instruction on English academic writings. A quasi-experimental research was conducted in this study, which involved seventy Ph.D students as participants. Those students were subdivided into treatment group (n=34) and comparison group (n=36). The explicit instruction includes a 'bottom-up' approach aiming to promote students' general English writing skills, and a 'top-down' approach targeting at improving students' academic writing abilities. The combination of 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' approaches clinging to the applications of online and offline corpora and corpus tools. The specific teaching procedures and relevant contents were presented in the current study. By comparing the writings before(pre-test) and after(post-test) the explicit instruction, the treatment group students significantly outperformed the comparison counterparts in terms of academic English writings. The treatment group students acquired a better strategy of introduction deployment, method adoption, result presentation, and discussion generation. Those findings triggered several pedagogical implications.