• Title/Summary/Keyword: Writing pedagogy

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Enhancing Writing Skills Through Portfolios

  • Rafik-Galea, Shameem
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.9 no.2
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    • pp.17-33
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    • 2003
  • College going students who are non-native speakers of English enrolled in English language programmes are not acquiring the needed academic writing skills. Many of these students do not have positive attitudes towards writing, thus forcing language instructors to look for ways of motivating students to write in order to improve writing skills. This action research project investigates the use of portfolio writing to improve writing ability among pre-university students. Research on the use of portfolio writing suggests that it is a useful way for developing interest in writing and for developing effective writing skills over a period of time. Portfolios support the best thinking in composition pedagogy in that it encourages process writing. Although the portfolio is considered a writing product, as a whole it is evidence of the students writing process. An important feature in using portfolios is that students are able to focus on their writing without constantly worrying about grades. Instructors have noticed that students make greater improvement in their writing when their focus is shifted from punitive feedback through letter grades to constructive feedback in the form of suggestions for further revision. This paper describes the use of writing portfolios as an effective means of teaching writing. The findings revealed that writing portfolios helped develop confidence in writing and decreased anxiety towards writing. (217 words)

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Using Small Corpora of Critiques to Set Pedagogical Goals in First Year ESP Business English

  • Wang, Yu-Chi;Davis, Richard Hill
    • Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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    • v.2 no.2
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    • pp.17-29
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    • 2021
  • The current study explores small corpora of critiques written by Chinese and non-Chinese university students and how strategies used by these writers compare with high-rated L1 students. Data collection includes three small corpora of student writing; 20 student critiques in 2017, 23 student critiques from 2018, and 23 critiques from the online Michigan MICUSP collection at the University of Michigan. The researchers employ Text Inspector and Lexical Complexity to identify university students' vocabulary knowledge and awareness of syntactic complexity. In addition, WMatrix4® is used to identify and support the comparison of lexical and semantic differences among the three corpora. The findings indicate that gaps between Chinese and non-Chinese writers in the same university classes exist in students' knowledge of grammatical features and interactional metadiscourse. In addition, critiques by Chinese writers are more likely to produce shorter clauses and sentences. In addition, the mean value of complex nominal and coordinate phrases is smaller for Chinese students than for non-Chinese and MICUSP writers. Finally, in terms of lexical bundles, Chinese student writers prefer clausal bundles instead of phrasal bundles, which, according to previous studies, are more often found in texts of skilled writers. The current study's findings suggest incorporating implicit and explicit instruction through the implementation of corpora in language classrooms to advance skills and strategies of all, but particularly of Chinese writers of English.

The Relationship between English Proficiency and Syntactic Complexity for Korean College Students (한국 대학생의 에세이에 나타난 영어 능력 수준과 통사적 복잡성 간의 관계 탐색)

  • Lee, Young-Ju
    • The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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    • v.7 no.3
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    • pp.439-444
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    • 2021
  • This study investigates the relationship between syntactic complexity and English proficiency for Korean college students, using the recently developed TAASSC(the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity) program. Essays on the ICNALE(International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus were employed and phrasal complexity indices and clausal complexity indices, respectively were used to predict English proficiency level for Korean students. Results of stepwise regression analysis showed that indices of phrasal complexity explained 8% of variance in English proficiency, while indices of clausal complexity accounted for approximately 11%. That is, indices of clausal complexity were slightly better predictors of English proficiency than indices of phrasal complexity, which contradicts Biber et at.(2011)'s claim that phrasal complexity is the hallmark of writing development.

Teaching Qualitative Research Methods in Library and Information Science (문헌정보학의 질적 연구방법 교육내용 개발)

  • Kim, Kapseon
    • Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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    • v.46 no.3
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    • pp.255-275
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    • 2015
  • The purpose of this study is to develop an approach to teaching qualitative research methods (TQRM) for Library and Information Science. To draw trend of TQRM, 76 course syllabi collected in the research oriented universities' master and doctoral programs, were analyzed using content analysis. The study proposes both common topics and essential strategies for TQRM in terms of the paradigm of qualitative research, research design, wide range of approaches to QR, diversity of collecting and analyzing data, writing, and evaluation criteria. It is very important to identify qualitative stance and to understand paradigms and philosophical and theoretical frameworks of QR for conducting QR reiteratively, creatively, reflectively.

"In the Beginning was the Deed": Sigmund Freud's Auditory Imagination

  • KIM, TaeChul
    • English & American cultural studies
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    • v.9 no.1
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    • pp.113-139
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    • 2009
  • Such is an elective affinity between literary studies and psychoanalysis that the latter sometime serves as a form of literary pedagogy. The affinity mainly consists in their shared concern for language. The signification of language in psychoanalysis is much similar to that of literature. Many of psychoanalytic terms and theoretical tenets bear witness to its dependence clinically on speech phenomena and theoretically on language in general. It is most true of Sigmund Freud, for whom the unconscious is in effect the linguistic unconscious. The Freudian unconscious, compressing and displacing through images and ideas, works as a text for psychoanalysis, which approach has not only paved one of the ways to poststructuralist anti-essentialism but with which literary studies also feel uncanny familiarity. Freudian psychoanalysis, starting empirically from clinical observations, discovers that words exist independent of meanings in the form of things in the unconscious system. Out of the various sensory elements of a word-thing, in psychoanalytic terms, the auditory is central. Now with the auditory imagination cultivated in the clinic, Freud figures out compression and displacement as the chief unconscious works, of which my main argument is that they are based phonetically on heteronym and homonym associations respectively. Compression and displacement work to be masks, which excites Freud's sense of challenge: his is a kind of poststructuralist approach, in the sense that the closed interrelatedness of words without external referents determines the signification in a given situation. But the works of compression and displacement, viewed in auditory terms rather than mapped on to metaphor and metonymy, can provide a new insight for a literary reading of Freud. Pursuing Freud's auditory imagination is not only an attempt to read his writing as literary text rather than for theoretical discussion, but also an experiment with the possibility of literary reading of a theoretical text in the age of after-theory.

The Relationship between Lexical Sophistication Features and English Proficiency for Korean College Students using TAALES Program (TAALES 프로그램을 활용하여 한국 대학생이 작성한 에세이에 나타난 어휘의 정교화 특성 비교)

  • Lee, Young-Ju
    • The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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    • v.7 no.3
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    • pp.433-438
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    • 2021
  • This study investigates the relationship between lexical sophistication features and English proficiency for Korean college students. Essays from the ICNALE(International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus were analyzed, using TAALES program. In order to examine whether or not there are statistically significant differences in lexical sophistication features across three groups, MANOVA was conducted. Results showed that the lexical sophistication features were significantly affected by English proficiency level. Essays written by Korean students with different English proficiency levels can be differentiated in terms of various lexical sophistication features including content words frequency, content words familiarity, lexical decision mean reaction time function words, hypernymy verbs, word naming response time function words, age of acquisition content words.

A Study on the Effectiveness and Possibility of General Chemistry Experiment Lecture with Flipped Classroom (거꾸로 교실을 적용한 일반화학실험 강좌의 효과 및 가능성 탐색 연구)

  • Yoon, Jihyun;Son, E Nok;Kang, Seong-Joo
    • Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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    • v.62 no.2
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    • pp.124-136
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    • 2018
  • In this study, we applied the flipped-classroom to the general chemistry experiment lecture of the domestic university with strong teacher-led, and explored the effects and possibilities of the course. For this purpose, 30 students who were enrolled in the Science Education Department of the College of Education in the metropolitan area were randomly assigned to two groups, namely, the flipped-classroom group and the traditional class group. Then, we developed a general chemistry experiment lessons based on the flipped-classroom along with visual materials and we applied the lessons for 15 weeks. After all the classes, we conducted a survey to see the students' perception of the general chemistry experiment lecture by flipped classroom. As a result of analysis, the students of the flipped-classroom group were more positive than the students of the traditional class group in terms of the usefulness of the class activity, the importance of each activity element for the successful learning, the learning level, and the intention for another lesson. As a result of analyzing students' perceptions in terms of general chemical experiment activities such as conducting experiments or writing reports and understanding the contents of experiments, the average score of the flippedclassroom group was higher than the traditional class group, and the main cause of this result was the video material provided by prior learning activities. In addition, as a result of analyzing students' perceptions in terms of interactions and self-directed learning in class, the average score of the flipped-classroom group was generally higher than the traditional class group. In particular, students' interactions and self-directed learning were statistically significant differences between the two groups. And the students' perception of video material was very positive, and it was analyzed that the video that the instructor directly explained experiment theory and method was the most favorite videos of students. We discussed educational implications of these findings.