Social Media Mediated Structured Knowledge Activity on EFL Prewriting Effects Study

• Main Authors: Fang-Chen Lu, 呂芳鎮
• Other Authors: 張立杰
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5962za

博士 === 國立中央大學 === 學習與教學研究所 === 106 === Social media interaction can benefit English as a foreign language (EFL) learning, but learners need a deliberate approach to pursue deeper learning. The purpose of this study was to explore social media mediated structured knowledge activity on EFL prewriting effects. The study further looked into adopting a structured concept map to represent private knowledge in three layers including the main idea, the lexical layer (namely synonyms or antonyms), and the online social-lexical layer. To this end, the aim of this study was to design a prewriting activity on social media using a computer-based concept map to assess participants’ writing performance in different aspects of writing. The designed prewriting activity comprised structuralized private knowledge, explicit knowledge affordance, and consolidated social activities. To evaluate the effects of the prewriting activity, an EFL prewriting experiment was conducted. In this experiment, 80 participants in a high school in Taiwan were evenly assigned to a control or experimental group. The participants’ writing essays and learning perceptions were collected, and the analysis results indicated that (1) a significant difference was found in the aspects of communicative quality, linguistic accuracy, and linguistic appropriacy. The results confirmed that the prewriting activity could encourage EFL learners actively and collaboratively to give online feedback in a writing community further conducive to use target words accurately and appropriately in an authentic context. (2) The questionnaire statistics aligned with similar findings that the prewriting activity helped learners’ writing from communicative quality and social collaboration perspectives. The aforementioned perspectives having to do with students’ life experiences as well as improving their social interaction with peers might be able to foster the students’ writing performance.