Instruction in Conjunction Usage and its Influence on College Students'' Compositions

• Main Authors: Sheng-I Yu, 余昇易
• Other Authors: Dempsey Jakob
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/27224568242301806795

碩士 === 元智大學 === 應用外語學系 === 95 === The main purpose of this study was to explore the effect of instruction in conjunction usage on college students’ compositions. Twenty college students in Yuan Ze University participated in this research. They were divided into two groups based on their overall writing quality in the pretest writings, and received eight hour instruction in conjunction usage. The research questions included whether the low- and the high-level students could benefit from the instruction to improve in their overall writing quality and other four fields which are content, organization, conjunction usage, and grammar & spelling. The result of this research showed that the low-level students performed better in overall writing quality and conjunction usage after the instruction, and the mean differences between pretest and posttest writings reached significant level (p<.05). The high-level students did not have better performance in all fields. That means, the instruction in conjunction usage were beneficial for the low-level students to improve their writings, but the influence on the high-level students was not so obvious. Conjunction usage was a problem that EFL writers felt confused of in the process of writings. How to teach conjunction usage and other cohesive devices to improve writings of students in different language proficiency may deserve further research.