scholarly journals Effects of form-focused instruction on EFL Learners’ Academic writing Skills

Author(s):  
Alinur Mohammed Ahmed
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-180
Author(s):  
Yenni Rozimela

ABSTRACT Writing is often regarded as a difficult skill to acquire by majority of EFL learners. Teaching writing is also unquestionably challenging. It is argued that an essential effort to assist learners is having them explore information to write through reading topic and genre- related sources extensively. This article seeks to explain the result of a study employing R&D method to develop a Reading-Based Model to teach academic writing. It will report the results of the needs analysis briefly and then explain the model itself. The data about the students' needs of writing according to the students and the writing lecturers were collected through questionnaire and interview. The results of needs analysis and relevant literature confirmed that reading prior and during writing is elemental. The syntax of the model was developed on the basis of literature dealing with the principles of reading-writing relations and the Genre-based Approach. It consists of 4 main stages. Some activities within each stage can be carried out online. The model has gone through a validation process by two experts (two experienced lecturers teaching writing skills). The model was considered valid by the experts; a few recommendations were concerned with additional activities.


Author(s):  
Neil Heffernan

This chapter looks at a critical thinking and academic writing skills course designed for Japanese learners of English. The study presents two sets of data from the 87 participants who have taken part in the course since its inception in 2008. The first data set is concerned with actual writing samples from multiple drafts of a medium-sized research project carried out by the student participants. The second data set results from a self-assessment survey given to the learners both at the beginning and end of the 15-week course described in this chapter. Further, results from a satisfaction survey given to learners at the end of the course are presented. The chapter concludes with some pedagogical implications for both Japanese and other Asian EFL learners and how the methods used in the course described within can be replicated elsewhere.


Author(s):  
Duc Huu Pham

To help EFL learners realize the use of nominals and clauses in practicing productive skills of academic writing in English writing tests, experiments have been exploited using the tasks similar to those of internet-based test of English as a foreign language to determine the nominal and clause level information during sentence and paragraph processing. Subjects were placed in two groups (the treatment group and the control group) and comprised English intermediate level students at a university in Vietnam performing compositions that were of lexical and clausal congruence but the congruence with discourse context was manipulated. The results indicated that lexical and clausal processing and discourse congruence have an effect on each other and influence writing skills. The study was undertaken as a basis for improving the technology-linguistics combined intake of learners' knowledge in order to accelerate the acquisition of foreign languages and will benefit future research related to computerized writing and assessment of writing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 2281-2292
Author(s):  
Pradhita Ramadhani ◽  
Endang Fauziati ◽  
Suparno Suparno

Academic writing in higher education mainly focuses on writing for publication. The success of writing for publication depends on the learners’ ability to access, understand the relevant references, evaluate, and synthesise the ideas, opinions, and sentences to make their academic pattern. Viewed from prior studies, it seems that many EFL learners have faced various problems in writing their academic papers, specifically writing for publication. To respond to this issue, this narrative inquiry aims to investigate (1) how learners acquire their knowledge in writing for publication, (2) the difficulties they face in writing for publication, and (3) how they face those difficulties. This present study intended to dig up the experiences of two graduate students of English Education major in writing for publication. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. Then, the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. This study shows that the participants acquired knowledge and experiences from various sources that were useful for writing their academic papers. Surprisingly, the various difficulties they faced motivated them to learn more and improve their writing skills for publication. Pedagogical and future research implications are further discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-402
Author(s):  
Åsa Mickwitz ◽  
Marja Suojala

Abstract High self-efficacy beliefs and effective self-regulatory strategies are increasingly important in academic settings, and especially in developing academic writing skills. This article deals with how students develop academic writing skills in two different pedagogical settings (as autonomous learners and in a traditional learning environment), and how this is associated with the students’ self-regulatory strategies and self-efficacy beliefs. In the study, self-regulatory skills referred to the ability to take charge of, manage and organize the learning process, while self-efficacy beliefs were defined as the strength of students’ confidence to accomplish an extensive task and sense of succeeding. The method was quantitative, including some qualitative elements, and data was elicited through a survey answered by 150 students, after they had attended courses in academic writing. The survey consisted of 1 open-ended question and 16 multiple-choice questions (a five-point Likert scale). The data was analyzed using SPSS. The results show that self-regulatory skills and self-efficacy beliefs have a greater impact on learning academic writing skills in traditional learning settings than in learning settings where the students are supposed to work more independently, and where teacher support is not available to the same extent.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Serpil Ucar ◽  
Ceyhun Yukselir

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector ‘thus’ in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary American English and 20 scientific articles of native speakers as control corpora, and 20 scientific articles of Turkish advanced EFL learners. The raw frequencies, frequencies per million words, frequencies per text and log-likelihood ratio were measured so as to compare varieties across the three corpora. The findings revealed that Turkish learners of English showed underuse in the use of the connector ‘thus’ in their academic prose compared to native speakers. Additionally, they did not demonstrate misuse in the use of the connector ‘thus’. Nevertheless, non-native learners of English tended to use this connector in a resultative role (cause-effect relation) more frequently whereas native speakers used it in appositional and summative roles more as well as its resultative role. Furthermore, the most frequent occurrences of ‘thus’ have been in academic genre.


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