How Journal Writing Affects the EFL Elementary School Students’ Writing Fluency and Grammatical Accuracy

• Main Authors: Cheng, Shu-Fen, 鄭淑芬
• Other Authors: Wang, Tzu-Fu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/22092288302469101422

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 應用外語系 === 103 === Journal writing has widely been used by ESL / EFL teachers and been confirmed as a strong treatment for ESL/EFL students’ writing proficiency. The integration of journal writing into teaching might serve as many purposes and both ESL/EFL teachers and students might obtain a great number of benefits from the implementation of journal writing. This study was designed to examine to prove that journal writing could either improve English writing fluency or increase English accuracy effectively by integrating free journal writing and topic-assigned writing. Sixty fifth and sixth grade EFL student participants studying at Victoria Academy were assigned to finish four free journal writing and two assigned controlled writing from November to December, 2013, in addition to weekly class grammar exercises and other writing practices. Afterwards, one questionnaire with three parts of evaluations was given to access the students’ reflections and thoughts towards the writing practice. The researcher also had kept grading rubric scales as records to examine the student participants’ writing progress, strengths and weaknesses. Several findings indicated that this project was able to strengthen and reinforce students’ writing fluency, content length, competence, and recognition of their writing weaknesses; however, grammatical accuracy improved slightly. In response to the results, the researcher recommended that further researches can focus on computer-assisted practice for the invention of the computer might be able to help students to “write” with more willingness and ease since typing, revising, and printing are much more convenient. Furthermore, language development and acquisition come from literacy input; thus, the other recommendation is to advise students to become more than adequate readers through more explosion to great amount of reading.