Developing Academic Writing Potential in an E-learning Environment
Jonathan Webster & Fung Kan Pun
Abstract
This paper focuses on investigating development of tertiary level students’ writing ability in
academic discourse in English. Following the substantial literature dealing with the patterns
of language choice typical of academic discourse in English, a set of criteria for measuring
academic writing potential was compiled and applied to the written work of tertiary students
in Hong Kong.
The Language Companion Course Project at City University of Hong Kong facilitates
online coaching between online language specialist coaches and students on written
assignments. Before finally submitting their essay to their subject teacher, who could be
teaching them anything from Biology to Accounting to Linguistics, each student will have
worked through two prior drafts with their coach. Each student’s drafts and the coach’s
comments are all collected in a database, thereby providing a very useful language learner
corpus for subsequent linguistic analysis.
In particular, we are focusing on the extent to which this drafting process contributes
to the development of students’ academic writing ability as evidenced over successive drafts
of their written assignments.
1. Introduction
An ongoing project on developing Hong Kong tertiary students’ English language writing
ability was the focus of a pre-pilot study at the City University of Hong Kong from January to
May, 2007 (September to December, 2007: Pilot study- phase I; January to May, 2008: Pilot
study: phase II). The aim of the project is to assist students with improving their English
language writing using an online system. The background of the project and the pre-pilot
study will be addressed in this paper, followed by some preliminary findings related to
academic writing and textual organization.
2. The Language Companion Course Project
The Language Companion Course (LCC) project at City University of Hong Kong, aims to
help students enhance their English language writing ability. The LCC project involves three
parties: students, online language specialist coaches, and subject teachers. Students can
submit drafts of their assignment to their assigned language specialist coach via a blog-based
Nina Nørgaard (ed.) 2008. Systemic Functional Linguistics in Use.
Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication vol. 29
(ISSN 0906-7612, ISBN: 978-87-90923-47-1)
interface implemented in Blackboard. The comments given by the coach include those
selected from a supplied comment bank and their own comments. The comments from the
comment bank appear as numbered links in the essay. By clicking on each comment, the
student is able to see an explanation and examples (Figure 2). Coaches avoid simply
correcting students’ work, and instead identify the nature of the problem to be addressed. A
final version will then be submitted to the subject teacher who will grade the assignment on
content, and also to the online language specialist coach who will grade it for language.
Figure 1: Illustration of inserted numbered links of comment
Figure 2: Explanations and examples of numbered comment
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The standardized comment bank contains 60 comments. The first five are shown in Table 1 as
an example. In addition to a pre-set list of comments, a coach’s text-specific comment can be
inserted at the end of a student’s essay. There are no restrictions on the end comments.
Comments
Article missing [01]
Article – wrong use[02]
Article – unnecessary[03]
Coherence – unclear introduction[04]
Coherence – logical sequence[05]
Table 1: Examples of numbered comments
All the students’ drafts, the coaches’ comments, and interactions between students and
coaches are automatically stored for subsequent inclusion in a learner corpus.
3. Pre-pilot study
A pre-pilot study was carried out in the period between January to May in 2007. The aim of
this pre-pilot study was to (i) examine the running of the system; (ii) evaluate the usefulness
of the system in terms of students’ benefit; (iii) improve and reconstruct the project, if
possible.
Two voluntary courses participated in this pre-pilot phase, involving a total of 94
undergraduate students, 67 majoring in Biology and 27 majoring in Linguistics and Language
Technology. Students could submit as many drafts as they wanted before the assignment’s
due date. The coaches returned the commented essay to students within 72 hours. At the time
of the pre-pilot study, the comment back was an open set with each coach allowed to
personalize their own set of comments. These sets of comments served as a reference for
compiling the comment bank which was setup before phase I of the pilot study.
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Comment Type
Tutor’s comment
Singular subjects have singular verbs. Plural subjects have
Agreement
plural verbs.
You need to outline the main ideas in the introductory
Coherence
paragraph to help your readers to get prepared for what you
are going to say next.
Error
There is an error here. Try to correct it by yourself.
Sentence level error
This sentence is not complete. It needs a main verb
Singular & Plural
You should use the singular form here.
Spelling
Try again
Table 2: Examples of comments and description previously adopted
Table 3 shows the frequency of drafts submission by the students. (Not all students submitted
at least one draft). A1 represents assignment 1, A2 assignment 2, and so on. Nearly half of the
students submitted two or more versions.
Draft(s)
Biology
submitted
A1
A2
A3
A1
A2
1
37.31%
37.31%
37.31%
29.63%
3.70%
2
32.84%
41.79%
32.84%
40.74%
37.04%
3 or more
4.48%
20.90%
14.93%
29.63%
59.26%
74.63%
100.00%
85.07%
100.00%
100.00%
Submission
Rate:
Linguistics
Table 3: Draft submission rate
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3.1 Findings I: Genre of academic discourse
In terms of academic discourse, we examined how well students’ essays fit the genre of
academic discourse. Eggins and Martin suggest 7 properties related to textual formality,
1. Use of standard unabbreviated syntax
2. No references to the writer
3. Thematic prominence (first position in the clause) given to the concept of
postmodernism or to generic groups of participants
4. Frequent use of embedding, where units of clause structure are filled by
elements which are themselves clauses
5. Lexically dense noun phrase structures with heavy post-modification
6. Nominalized vocabulary
7. Use of ‘elevated’ vocabulary
(Eggins & Martin, 1997)
Two out of the seven criteria were selected for this present investigation: (i) no reference to
the writer in a participant role as identified in terms of personal pronouns; and (ii) use of
embedding through the clausal relationship in terms of hypotaxis and parataxis.
Comparatively speaking, we expected that students’ essays might exhibit greater textual
formality, with no, or fewer personal pronouns, and with greater use of hypotaxis and
parataxis. The percentage of the designated feature is obtained through
⎛ N Feature occurrence of student nth
⎞
Mean of Percentage = ⎜∑
×
100%
N
⎟
th
⎝ n=1 number of clause of student n
⎠
We focused on the assignment in the Linguistics course including 27 students and 52 drafts.
Figure 3 shows there is no clear correlation between the students’ language grade and their
use of personal pronouns. Figure 4 suggests that using simple sentence structure contributes
to getting a higher grade. A number of factors likely influenced the outcome. For example, if
coaches were focusing more on correcting surface grammatical mistakes, then a student with
simpler sentence structure might have made fewer grammatical errors than a student who
attempted more complex grammatical combinations.
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Figure 3: Percentage of personal pronouns used across score
Figure 4: Percentage of clause complexes used across score
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3.2 Findings II: Grammaticality and textual organization
Figure 5 shows two additional findings: the error mean drops the more drafts a student
submits; and secondly, the error mean drops in the second assignment.
Figure 5: Error mean across drafts
Coaches’ comments can be classified into two main categories, one dealing with surface
grammaticality, and the other with textual organization. Described by Chiang (1999),
grammar traits (grammaticality) refers to morphology and syntax, whereas discourse traits
(textual organization) refers to the cohesion and coherence of the text.
Linguistics students were divided into three groups according to how many drafts they
submitted.1 The following figures show the relationship between error mean and number of
drafts submitted for the three groups of students respectively. Excluding comments, such as
“delete this”, there were 954 comments, with 693 comments addressing grammaticality, and
252 addressing textual organization.
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Figure 6: Error Mean (grammaticality) across drafts
Figure 7: Error Mean (textual organization) across drafts
Figure 6 shows a steady decrease in the error mean when students revised their essays in
terms of grammar. It is interesting to note that those students who submitted only one version
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have a lower error mean than those who submitted twice, and those who submitted three
drafts obtained the highest error mean.
When it comes to the textual organization, however, the tendency shows a decrease
from the first draft to the last draft. Coaches commented more on textual organization for
those who only submitted once, and who had the lowest error mean in grammaticality. This
may suggest that it is a step-by-step process; the coaches tend to address the grammaticality
before textual organization. Nonetheless, the error mean drops with successive drafts
submitted.
4. Conclusion and Further study
Preliminary findings from the pre-pilot study show that students have demonstrated some
improvement in their English language writing across successive drafts and assignments;
however, too little attention has been given to issues related to academic discourse, including
textual organization and textual appropriateness. As pointed out by Byrnes (2002), in taskbased writing development, it is important to specify the required genre for a particular
writing task. Besides knowing the different requirements between genres, it is also important
for the student to master the necessary features of each genre.
Jonathan J. Webster
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
City University of Hong Kong
[email protected]
Fung-Kan Pun
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
City University of Hong Kong
[email protected]
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Note
1
An assumption is also made that students who submitted more than 3 drafts are counted towards the
group of “3 versions” without further identification. This is hoped to enhance the accuracy in
comparing the error mean across drafts in terms of grammaticality and textual organization.
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References
Byrnes, H. (2002). “Fostering Writing Development Through Task-based Writing.”
(http://www3.georgetown.edu/departments/german/programs/curriculum/4taskbased.ht
ml).
Chiang, S. (1999). “Assessing grammatical and textual features in L2 writing samples: The
case of French as a foreign language.” The Modern Language Journal, 83. 219-232.
Eggins, S. & Martin, J.R. (1997). “Genres and Registers of Discourse.” In T. A. can Dijk (ed.)
Discourse as Structure and Process. London: Sage. 3-39.
Martin, J.R. (1993a). “A Contextual Theory of Language.” In W. Cope & M. Kalantzis (eds.)
The Power of Literacy: a genre approach to teaching literacy. London: Falmer. 116136.
Martin, J.R. & Rothery, J. (1993b). “Grammar: Making Meaning in Writing.” In W. Cope &
M. Kalantzis (eds.) The Power of Literacy: a genre approach to teaching literacy.
London: Falmer. 137-153.
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