| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === The purpose of the study is to examine the effectiveness of an EAP writing workshop that focused on the teaching of introduction and discussion sections in research papers. The participants included 22 graduate students from the Life Science department in a university in northern Taiwan. This study employed a one group quasi-experimental pre-test and post-test design. In the first class, participants submitted a paper they wrote before, from which the pre-test score was obtained.
Participants also filled in a background questionnaire, which surveyed students’ experiences in learning writing in English. After that, students received instructions in the writing of research article introduction and discussion sections. For the introduction section, students received about fifteen hours of instruction; for the discussion section, students received about nine hours of instruction. For the post-test, participants revised their pre-test writing samples based on what they learned in the class. At the last meeting, the participants were asked to fill in an evaluative questionnaire, eliciting their opinions on the workshop. At the end of the workshop, six participants were selected to participate in individual interview, with each interview lasting 90 minutes.
The comparison of the pretest and post-test scores on the rhetorical structure of the introduction and discussion sections showed that the participants did not improve significantly in the introduction section, but they did in the discussion section. The results indicated this one-month EAP writing workshop did not have statistically significant results on the introduction section. The discussion section was statistically significant, which may be related to the higher percentage of doctoral students handed in their discussion sections.
The analysis of the questionnaire and interview data revealed that the participants’major problems for general writing lied in incompetence in vocabulary and grammar. The major challenge they had for academic writing was their lack of rhetorical skills and knowledge for organization. The participants wanted to have more hands-on analyses of the papers taken from their fields by themselves during the class. As with the EAP writing instructor, the participants wanted to have both the content area teacher and the language teacher to instruct the class together. The participants also expressed their urgent need for a writing center that can offer editorial services and courses. The ideal editor would be a native speaker from their field. The participants seem to be weak at their fundamental English ability. It is suggested that more general writing courses can be offered to the students to raise their basic competence in English. Students will be more competent to learn to write EAP writing when they are equipped with the general writing ability.
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