Writing Course Research Articles

The Effects of Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy Enriched Instruction on EFL Learners’ Writing Performance in an Academic Writing Course

The Effects of Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy Enriched Instruction on EFL Learners’ Writing Performance in an Academic Writing Course

From Nature to Pen: Designing an Inclusive Writing Course for Educators

This design case highlights a collaborative effort among teachers, professors, park rangers, and local mindfulness instructors. Together, they developed a virtual course aimed at promoting wellness through nature and reflective writing, while emphasizing diversity. The team utilized instructional design processes and levels of culture to create an inclusive asynchronous course for educators. They faced challenges regarding the design team composition and the influence of popular culture, which hindered inclusivity. Recommendations include diversifying the design team, incorporating a diversity, equity, and inclusion audit, and allowing intentional planning time. These steps aim to enhance inclusivity and cater to diverse populations in instructional design endeavors.

ERROR ANALYSIS OF AFFIXATION USE IN ACADEMIC WRITING: IMPLICATIONS FOR A SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Word formation through affixation is one of the most important elements in achieving the English language proficiency. The previous literature on this research area revealed that learners of English find it difficult to use affixation properly in their academic writing. Therefore, this study sought to identify the errors of affixation use committed by Saudi EFL students when they write in English. The researchers employed a descriptive qualitative approach to achieve the objective of the study. The participants comprised thirty students from the Department of the English Language at King Khalid University. The students were purposively selected from the Writing (4) course, which is a basic requirement for students to graduate from the English program. The researchers collected the data by asking the students to write an essay of no more than 200 words about online learning. The analysis of results conformed to [1] approach for analyzing errors of affixation use that includes the identification of errors, classification of errors, quantification of errors, and interpretation of errors. The findings of this study showed that students committed different types of errors such as misordering, misformation, omission, and addition. The main factors for those errors were students’ limited vocabulary size and lack of grammatical knowledge. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications to students, teachers, and curriculum designers. Keywords: Error Analysis, Affixation, Morpheme, Academic Writing, Saudi EFL Learners DOI： https://doi.org/10.35741/issn.0258-2724.58.2.41

An Evaluation of Academic Writing Course Materials Used for International Students From the Perspectives of Students and Teachers

An indispensable part of the success of a foreign language teaching program is the course material evaluation process. Therefore, it is thought that examining whether the teaching materials and practices used to improve the academic skills of international students meet the needs of students and teachers will contribute to the literature. In this study, which was planned as a case study for this purpose, the course materials and teaching practices used for teaching academic writing to international students at four state universities were evaluated by investigating students’ and teachers’ views. In the research, a materials evaluation questionnaire and semi-structured interview forms were used as data collection tools. Based on the literature, a questionnaire was adapted and the quantitative data were collected through this questionnaire. As for the qualitative data collection, focus group interviews were conducted with teachers and students. Analyzing the data received, the suitability of the materials and applications used in the education environment was examined and suggestions have been put forward for designing more effective materials and curriculum.

Cohesion Profiles of L2 Writings by Korean EFL College Learners

This study is to explore the cohesion profiles of L2 writings both quantitatively and qualitatively in the course of process writing by L2 English learners to see if learners exhibit any progress in subsequent drafts. Three students’ writing samples were collected from a course of Logic and Essay Writing offered at a university in Jeollanam-do in Korea. Their three subsequent drafts of English learning autobiographies in the course of recursive process writing were analyzed both quantitatively using Coh-Metrix and qualitatively based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices. Coh-Metrix indices relevant to cohesion including descriptive indices, referential cohesion indices, and connective indices of three learners‘ writing samples were examined. In addition to the quantitative analysis between three writings and between the three drafts, qualitatively divergent patterns in the use of respective cohesive devices were discussed.

The Development of Short Story Creative Writing Teaching Materials in Wetland Environment

This research objective was to design teaching materials containing short story writing material for students taking Creative Writing Courses. Writing short stories is a complex competency, even for undergraduate students. Various problems arise in the creative writing process. One is the lack of learning materials that suit the students’ needs. Therefore, this research aimed at developing materials to solve the lack of teaching materials related to writing short stories. The object of this research and development consisted of students who took creative writing courses at the Indonesian Language and Literature Education study program, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Lambung Mangkurat University. This research procedure included (1) conducting needs analysis, (2) developing teaching materials, (3) designing and conducting formative evaluations, (4) revising teaching materials, and (5) conducting summative evaluations or product trials. The material that has been completed has gone through a trial phase for students and showed an increase in students’ knowledge and skills in writing short stories.

An Analysis Of PBSI Students' Ability and Component Levels Of Narrative Texts

This research was structured with two objectives, the first, to describe the ability to write personal narrative essays of PBSI USD students with Storybird media. Second, describe what components of narrative writing need to be improved in Creative Writing lectures. This research is included in quantitative descriptive research. The population in this study were sixty-nine PBSI USD students who took the Creative Writing course. The source of the data in this study is the result of a narrative essay made by the sixty-nine PBSI USD students who took the Creative Writing course. To determine the level of ability to write narrative descriptions, the components of narrative writing that have not been mastered by students include orientation, complications, evaluation (if any), resolution, code, linguistics of narrative essay, and spelling. This research data collection was carried out using a narrative writing test using the Storybird media. Based on the results of calculations and data analysis, two results were obtained from this study. First, the ability to write narratives of personal experiences of PBSI USD students using Storybird is in the medium category with an average of 5,33, the standard deviation of 1.94, and is in the score interval of 4.36-6.2. Second, there are two narrative components that need to be improved in creative writing training, especially in narrative writing. The two components include the structure of the narrative text and linguistic components at the phonological, morphology, syntax, and spelling levels.

STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCE ON LEARNING ENGLISH ESSAY WRITING WITH TEACHER’S APPLICATION OF ONLINE TOOLS

Recently, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic which has broadly initiated the rise of digital literacy and teaching has inevitably been taking place on online platform. Converted from the conventional teaching mode to the online mode, both teachers and students certainly faced difficulties, especially in the area of EFL. Teaching and learning English essay writing has always been a challenging task for EFL teachers and learners. This paper aims to examine the non-English major third-year students‟ experience on learning an English Essay Writing course with teacher‟s application of online tools at University of Foreign Language Studies-The University of Da Nang (UFLS-UD). 22 Oriental Studies major thirdyear students attending the course Viet luan tieng Anh-01 DPH (English Essay Writing course-01 DPH) in academic year 2021-2022 were surveyed with questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Data analysis shows that students experienced many difficulties in learning English Essay Writing virtually, among which the most difficult one is “Lacking face-to-face communication in solving group tasks….” Their feedback on the efficiency of the online tools applied in the course was also detected. Some suggestions for improving the quality of teaching and learning English Essay Writing with the help of online tools were also proposed.

Explicitly Teaching Five Technical Genres to English First-Language Adults in a Multi-Major Technical Writing Course

My research focuses on students who speak English as their first language and are currently enrolled in a technical writing class open to students from many majors. I will report in this post on the outcomes of teaching these students five distinct types of technical writing. In this case, the students in issue have English as their mother tongue. Previous experimental research has shown that it is useful to explicitly teach academic writing to adults who speak English as their first language. The findings of the research have proved this.
 In contrast, no research on technical writing has ever been conducted compared to this study's level of depth and breadth. In order to investigate these effects, I employed a strategy that included a few different research approaches. In order to present a more comprehensive, in-depth characterization of the 534 texts authored by 316 student authors, this approach consisted of a control-group quasi-experimental design with a qualitative analysis. These were the components that made up the strategy. According to the findings, the participants in the genre workshop created writings with a significantly higher sensitivity to audience, purpose, structure, design, style, and editing than those generated by participants who were taught using more traditional approaches. Participants displayed a superior awareness of audience, aim, and editing while working within the framework of technical genres in the job materials text type instead of the procedures text type. This was the case when comparing the two text types. When contrasting the two different forms of text, this was the result.

Implementing a Portfolio-based Learner Autonomy Development Model in an EFL Writing Course

Learner autonomy is believed to play a leading role in life-long learning; as a result, a myriad of studies have been conducted to discover tools to promote learner autonomy (e.g., blogs, Facebook, web 2.0, learning contracts, etc.). Nevertheless, the effects of a portfolio on promoting learner autonomy have not been explored much. This paper endeavored to investigate whether or not learner autonomy was developed with the implementation of the portfolio-based learner autonomy development (PLAD) model in an EFL writing course. Regarding research methodology, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from a questionnaire with closed-ended and open-ended items and reflection logs kept in portfolios. For data analysis, the quantitative data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, whereas qualitative data were analyzed through content analysis. The findings showed the development of learner autonomy after the course in which a portfolio was employed as a learning tool. In particular, the participants were aware of learner autonomy and felt positive about autonomous learning tasks, especially writing reflection. Self-assessment, however, was the most challenging task which they encountered because of lack of confidence and experience. In addition, it was evident that the participants could choose learning materials when they were offered freedom and rights to do this task.

플립러닝을 활용한 대학교양영어 작문 수업 연구

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the learners’ academic achievement and English writing class using flipped learning, how students perceive different feedback activities on their English composition, and how students perceive the individual work, pair work, and group work. Participants consisted of 120 non-English major students enrolled in English Writing course at a university. They were assigned into groups: two control groups in teacher’s lecture-style classes and two experimental groups in flipped learning classes. A test of English composition was conducted before and after the treatment, and a questionnaire and an interview were carried out to explore the participants’ perception of different feedback activities and individual/pair/group work. The results showed that flipped learning in writing class did not have any significant effect on learners’ academic achievement. In addition, learners preferred to work individually and get feedback from a computer rather than peer feedback.

Requirement Analysis and Teaching Strategies for Advanced English Writing Course Based on Blended Learning Algorithm

To make advanced English writing course in colleges and universities better service economic development, the teaching status quo of advanced English writing in several colleges and universities in Xi'an is studied through the questionnaire survey, and suggestions from students are collected and analyzed based on the theory of requirement analysis. The questionnaire survey results show that 60% of students take advanced English writing course to be more competitive in their professional fields. However, teaching in advanced English writing at this stage cannot meet their requirements for academic paper writing, and 50% of the students are less satisfied with the current advanced English writing course. They hope that academic English can be incorporated into comprehensive English, so that they can improve their ability to use academic English. The requirement analysis on advanced English writing reveals that students hope to have a more comprehensive teaching mode for English writing, and put forward different requirements for teachers' qualifications, class size, teaching mode, and teaching content. In response to these requirements, teaching strategies on advanced English writing are discussed, so as to establish a more complete teaching system for advanced English writing. This study is of great significance for research on advanced English writing course in China.

L2 Students’ Adaptive Transfer Beyond First-Year Writing

Learning transfer with regard to academic literacy in higher education has drawn more and more researchers’ attention in recent years (Baik & Greig, 2009). However, only a small number of transfer studies are pertinent to international and multilingual students or second language (L2) writing instruction. Situated in the area of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), this research investigates international and multilingual undergraduate students’ writing practice and development within and across the disciplines. Specifically, it looks into six Chinese international students’ learning transfer from their First-Year Writing (FYW) course to disciplinary writing in the college years. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of adaptive transfer proposed by Depalma and Ringer (2011), this study redefines transfer in L2 writing and expands the research scope of transfer studies. It examines writing transfer from a new vantage point by including writers’ creative and/or strategic transformation of learned knowledge.
 Using the case study methodology, this research documents detailed processes of how international and multilingual undergraduate students adapt and transform prior writing knowledge and experiences to construct discipline-specific literacy. The findings have captured a series of writing practices cutting across those students’ approach to language, rhetoric, and genre and identified the factors that contextualize their writing practices.

Indonesian Tertiary Education Students’ Academic Writing Setbacks and Solutions

Writing is a crucial skill and tertiary education students face difficulties in academic writing. This paper aimed to identify the setbacks or difficulties and the solutions to the setbacks experienced by the Indonesian tertiary education students in academic writing. A survey was used as the method of this study. The data were collected through a questionnaire using a Google form distributed to 26 fifth-semester students taking the Academic Writing course in the English Language Education Study Program of Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, for the academic year 2019/2020. The survey results showed that, in general, the students faced setbacks in, for example, parts of speech, tenses, spelling, prepositions, vocabulary, punctuation, cohesion, discourse markers, writing paragraphs with a clear focus, constructing clear and coherent academic essays, paraphrasing, in-text referencing, and compiling a correct reference list. Concerning academic writing solutions, the results showed that lecturers should be trained and equipped with various writing strategies, feedback on the strengths and weaknesses was vital, and the students needed to improve their organization of ideas, for example. Other solutions were better language skills, language elements, critical thinking skills, paraphrasing, and referencing. Implications of the findings are that students and lecturers would understand and identify common setbacks in academic writing and have opportunities to adopt the suggested solutions to academic writing difficulties.

Identify students’ difficulties in essay writing courses

This study aims to determine the students' difficulties in the Essay Writing course. The subjects of this study were fifth semester students of the Department of English Education at IAIN Sultan Amai Gorontalo for the 2019/2020 academic year, totaling 5 students. The method used in this study is a qualitative method with a descriptive design. Data was collected through observation sheets, interviews and documentation. Analysis data is done through data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The results showed that there were four difficulties in the Essay Writing course, namely Lack of vocabulary, Lack of grammar mastery, Lack of organization and mechanics mastery in writing. The researcher implies that lecturers must pay attention to students' vocabulary mastery and students' grammatical skills.

Identify students’ difficulties in essay writing courses

This study aims to determine the students' difficulties in the Essay Writing course. The subjects of this study were fifth semester students of the Department of English Education at IAIN Sultan Amai Gorontalo for the 2019/2020 academic year, totaling 5 students. The method used in this study is a qualitative method with a descriptive design. Data was collected through observation sheets, interviews and documentation. Analysis data is done through data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The results showed that there were four difficulties in the Essay Writing course, namely Lack of vocabulary, Lack of grammar mastery, Lack of organization and mechanics mastery in writing. The researcher implies that lecturers must pay attention to students' vocabulary mastery and students' grammatical skills.

Writing Academic: A Comparison Between Academic Writing Courses in English in the Aurora Alliance and in English-Speaking Countries

Students and teachers from different language backgrounds are at risk of becoming victims of conflicting trends and conventions when writing in English. This study compares conventions of English academic writing at several European universities with what is taught in English-speaking countries. Data were collected with questionnaires and by surveying university guidelines published online. The analysis shows that the basic concepts are similar, but there are differences in the attitude to accessible and inclusive language. This, however, does not seem to reflect on students’ appreciation of their own needs, since they seem pleased with their courses and their own abilities.

Motivational Strategies Adopted in Postgraduate English Academic Writing Courses: Perspectives of Doctoral Students

Despite postgraduates’ struggles to master English academic writing, the fulfilment of postgraduates’ motivational needs in classes of English academic writing has been scarcely researched. This study examines the motivational practices of teachers of postgraduate English academic writing, the perceived effectiveness of the adopted strategies, and possible ways to further enhance their effectiveness. Reflective writing was collected from 59 doctoral students who spoke English as a foreign language (EFL) and were enrolled in a thesis writing course. The major findings are: (1) The reported motivational strategies correspond fairly closely to those endorsed in Dörnyei’s influential framework, yet some appear to be common teaching techniques; (2) the majority of the reported positive effects pertain to enhanced knowledge, performance, and confidence; and (3) the participants called for increased use of motivational strategies, more student engagement, and diverse facilitative input from the English teacher. The findings confirm the need to extend studies on the use and perceptions of motivational strategies to postgraduate language teaching contexts.

EFL University Students’ Difficulties in the Essay Writing Process

<div class="WordSection1"><p>Research on foreign language writing has shown that most EFL students faced some difficulties to produce a good composition in English. However, attention has mainly been directed to explore errors found on students’ written work. Little is known about what difficulties students have in the writing process. The present study investigates difficulties students faced in the six steps of writing process, namely choosing a topic, gathering ideas, outlining or organizing ideas, writing the first draft, reviewing the content and structure, as well as revising and making final correction. This study applied a qualitative method by using questionnaire and interview to collect the data. The subjects were English Language Education students who were taking an Essay Writing course in the third semester. The findings indicate that students face difficulties in all steps of essay writing process. Among those six steps, outlining and gathering ideas are claimed as the most effortful steps students have to pass. Writing the first draft and revising are the next two steps considered as challenging. Lastly, choosing a topic and reviewing content and structure are also demanding for small part of students. The difficulties students have and suggestions they propose are presented in this study. Those could be a basis for doing some improvements at institutional as well as individual level.</p></div>

Online Scaffolding Strategies: Case Studies of Asian EFL Learners in an Academic Writing Course

The article reported a case study investigating the scaffolding strategies of twelve Asian EFL learners in four small groups’ scaffolding strategies during two online collaborative writing (OCW) tasks in a composition course using Google Docs as a writing platform. Of interest was how EFL learners with different L1 scaffold each other while co-constructing OCW tasks, and also if scaffolding strategies used during OCW tasks influence writing performance. Data collection included pre-test and post-test writing, two OCW tasks on descriptive and argumentative essays, learners’ use of scaffolding and non-scaffolding negotiations during OCW tasks observed through Google Docs revision history, and student reflection. The findings showed that learners in small groups employed both scaffolding and non-scaffolding dialogues to jointly construct their OCW tasks by giving advice, providing suggestions, responding to questions or requests, asking questions, or clarifying ideas. Learners who contributed more texts directed their team and initiated both scaffolding negotiations and non-negotiations while performing group work. The study results also revealed that members who employed more scaffolding negotiations during their OCW processes likely produced a better quality of writing in their post-test. Nevertheless, these findings indicated that members in small groups benefited from both scaffolding and non-scaffolding negotiations as they helped in task revisions. The findings contributed to research that has investigated online scaffolding strategies in EFL learners’ collaborative writing tasks.