Interactive Writing via Email: A Case Study of Three Elementary School Students

• Main Authors: Pi, Hsien-yun, 畢先芸
• Other Authors: Chen, Chin-fen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/65448888299562989742

碩士 === 國立台北師範學院 === 兒童英語教育研究所 === 90 === The study, from July 1 to August 31, 2001, is to examine the effects of learning English writing through intensive interaction with a native English speaker (NES) via email. There are three students in the study; two of them wrote interactively with their NES pen pal and one wrote on his own. Emails are analyzed both semantically and syntactically by the measures of the MLU (Mean Length of Utterances), IPSyn (Index of Productive Syntax) system, and the official vocabulary standard issued by the Ministry of Education of Taipei City Government in 2000. The results indicate that email correspondence contributed greatly to the growth of the students’ English writing in terms of lexical complexity, sentence length, and syntactic complexity. The students used many difficult words, phrases, and complicated sentence patterns from the incoming emails. Because of the dialogues occurring in the correspondence, the students learned many advanced words and syntactic structures, such as the present perfect construction and passive construction. Furthermore, they learned how to describe, explain, and elaborate in English, which are quite beneficial to their cognitive development. Compared to the self-writing participant, the student correspondents used more number or a greater proportion of difficult words in their emails. Also, for the same correspondence period, the more capable student correspondent wrote longer sentences than his similarly proficient self-writing peer (8.98 words per sentence vs. 7.97 words per sentence). Moreover, through correspondence, the students cultivated their cultural awareness. In conclusion, the scaffolding of the writing models and the dialogic nature of email correspondence are keys leading to the success of second language writing. Those who learn English from email correspondence will learn not only the language but also things beyond the language itself.