Effects of Online Academic English Materials on Graduate Students' Writing: Introductions in Research Articles of the Applied Linguistic Disciplines

• Main Authors: Yung-Chru Tsai, 蔡咏秋
• Other Authors: Hsien-Chin Liou
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/99194219473493584434

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 94 === The genre of research article introductions has been a long-term interest of text analysts in the academic research setting (e.g., Swales, 1990). Most of the past studies, however, put emphasis on analysis, while few have applied the results to instructional material development. The present study aimed to examine the effects of online instruction on the research article introductions by linking the results of text analyses of an introduction corpus with pedagogical practice. A corpus of 60 article introductions in the applied linguistics discipline was compiled for move analysis and corpus analysis. The move analysis was conducted with codes tagged manually to the texts in the corpus, while corpus analysis of important register features including lexical bundles, collocations, and reporting verbs was conducted semi-automatically. The instructional materials were constructed based on the analyzed results. An online peer editing platform (POWER) and a concordancer (CARE) with authentic examples from the academic corpus were added to enhance the course delivery. Six graduate students in the English teaching field were involved in the assessment phase of the project. Students’ writing samples collected before and after the instructional period were collected for rating and text analysis. The major concerns in assessment and text analysis were move structures, linguistic feature of metadiscourse markers, and the source writing. In addition, learners’ perceptions toward the usefulness of the online instruction, including the design of instructional materials, overall design, and the learning tools used, were elicited from an evaluation questionnaire. The results of the evaluation and text analysis showed that the academic writing skill of the learners for introduction writing improved from the pre-course to the post-course stage. The move organization of students’ writing was improved with an increased use of obligatory moves, the metadiscourse markers were more productive in terms of the types of items in use, and the choice of words seemed to be more attuned to the style of academic writing. Source writing was considered the dimension with least progress in that the surface forms and the evaluative functions of citations used by the learners were discrepant from the norms of the experienced writers (Hyland, 2000). The results of the evaluation questionnaire pointed out that learners generally hold a positive attitude toward the online course instruction. Among the online materials developed, the learners indicated the instruction on move structures was most useful to their writing, and that they were willing to revisit the online learning materials for guidance in the future. Further, the experience of concordancing learning was beneficial to their learning of moves in terms of their functional usages and linguistic realizations. The results of the present study not only showed that the online instruction on the introduction of RA genre could foster learners’ skills of academic writing, but also demonstrated the possible link between corpus analysis and pedagogical practice. It is suggested that course designers given for academic purposes could conduct corpus analysis with texts of the target genre for the development of instructional materials; in practice, we encourage students to explore the nature of the target genre with concordancing learning. With regard to the directions for future research, it is suggested that an inclusion of more subjects with a control group, and a larger sample size of corpus data is needed for more rigorous analyses.