An Investigation of English Academic Writing Process: A Case Study of Novice EFL Writers

• Main Authors: Jill Shu-Chen Chang, 張淑貞
• Other Authors: 黃月貴
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/y22r3c

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 105 === The purpose of this study was to investigate novice student writers’ (NSWs) L2 academic writing processes. The participants were four freshmen business majors. The study has three foci: the topic selection, the incorporation of relevant academic writing feedback, and three self-revisions. Drawing on qualitative research, data was collected from pre-interview questionnaires, interview transcripts, NSWs’ writing samples, teachers’ feedback along with subsequent revisions, and three self-revisions along with open-ended questionnaires. The results of the research showed that the NSWs’ background knowledge constituted a major factor driving them to decide their L2 academic writing topics. On top of that, L1 played a crucial role on NSW’s L2 academic writing. The diversity of teachers’ feedbacks including local, global, and some writing strategies did help the NSWs to overcome some writing difficulties. However, they were unable to incorporate all the feedback immediately due to their limited linguistic and L2 academic writing knowledge. They mainly focused on the local errors corrections on their subsequent revisions. Furthermore, in the three self-revisions, they tried to use connectors to connect sentences and paragraphs, substitute words to replace their original use, and change sentence structures or organizational arrangements to convey meaning, all of which demonstrating NSWs’ increased awareness of the use of cohesive devices, and the importance of lexical choices and organizational flow in presenting ideas. Findings of the study echo the importance of reading input as a means to build fundamental background knowledge and linguistic ability to the development of writing skills.