scholarly journals A Comparative Study of Reporting Verbs Used in the Introduction Chapters of Bachelor’s Theses and Master’s Theses by Chinese English-Majored Students

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuangqing Wen ◽  
Issra Pramoolsook
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Similar Distribution ◽  
Master's Students ◽  
Chinese Context ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Classification Framework ◽  
Thesis Writing

Reporting verbs (RVs), as rhetorical lexical devices, play a key role in academic writing because they enable writers to attribute content to other sources and allow them to convey both the kind of activities reported and their evaluation of the reported information. However, no study has been conducted on how RVs are used differently between bachelor’s theses (BTs) and master’s theses (MTs) in the Chinese context. Through corpus-based and comparative analysis, this study, therefore, aims to analyze and compare the use of RVs between 30 BT Introduction Chapters and 30 MT Introduction Chapters by Chinese English-majored students in terms of denotative potentials and evaluative functions based on Hyland’s (2002) classification framework. The results reveal that RVs used by undergraduate students are smaller in amount and narrower in range compared with those used by master’s students. Concerning the denotative potentials of RVs, a similar distribution of RVs was found in the two corpora. Both undergraduate and master’s students prefer Discourse Act RVs and Research Act RVs to Cognition Act RVs. Regarding their evaluative functions, undergraduate students show a tendency toward non-factive RVs, while master’s students tend to use factive RVs. These findings provide a valuable view of how Chinese English-majored students use RVs in their thesis writing, but their knowledge of the rhetorical functions of this device is still insufficient. The findings might increase thesis writers’ knowledge on the significance of RVs and raise their awareness of using RVs appropriately and effectively in their thesis writing, or even in all kinds of academic discourse. This paper then provides some suggestions for thesis writing courses.

scholarly journals Making the transition to master’s dissertation writing: evaluating the impact of a dissertation writing course on PGT students’ confidence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Diane Crisfield
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Master's Students ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dissertation Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Postgraduate Research ◽  
Thesis Writing ◽  
The Impact

 The transition from undergraduate to postgraduate taught (PGT) studies has received increasing focus over the past decade as universities and educators have recognised that master’s students do not necessarily begin their studies equipped with the academic skills necessary to succeed (O’Donnell et al., 2009; Bunney, 2017; McPherson et al., 2017). Research on postgraduate research (PGR) students demonstrates that thesis writing courses improve students’ confidence in their abilities (Larcombe et al., 2007; Fergie et al., 2011), but to date, the transition from writing for module assessments to master’s dissertation writing remains largely unstudied. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a short master’s dissertation writing course − delivered at a British university in the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years − on improving students’ confidence in their writing abilities, as reported in pre-course and post-course writing self-evaluations. In both years that the course was offered, there was a significant increase in reported confidence between the first session and the final session, and thematic analysis of open-ended questions demonstrated that students enrolled on the course to improve their knowledge of and confidence in academic writing and left the course having met these goals. This paper confirms that dissertation writing support designed for PGT students can have a positive impact on students’ confidence in their writing abilities, and thus help support them in making the transition to dissertation writing.

scholarly journals A Study of University Students in Japan: Learning and Application of Academic English Writing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
James Graham McKinley
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Social Constructivist ◽  
Academic English ◽  
Writing Classes ◽  
Writer Identity ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
The Rich

<p>This study investigated Japanese first and second year undergraduate students learning English academic writing in their compulsory English composition courses in a Japanese university. The thesis takes a social constructivist approach to investigate the aspects of critical argument and writer identity in these students’ classes and their writing.  The data for the study include classroom observations and teacher and student interviews, all conducted monthly throughout the academic year-long course. In total there were six courses, four teachers, and sixteen student participants. The observations were analyzed using an adapted version of Ivanič’s (2004) Discourses of Writing framework, which focused on aspects of identity construction in the writing classroom. The linguistic data included a selection of one major piece of writing from each student, analyzed using an adapted Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin, 1997; 2000). In order to maintain a focus on writer identity in the analysis, Clark and Ivanič’s (1997) selves were identified through this analysis. In addition, the texts were analyzed for use of Casanave’s (2002) writing game strategies, in order to further establish the students’ approaches in writing their texts. The objective was not to generalize about how Japanese students learn to write academic English, but rather to provide, from a social constructivist, Western researcher’s perspective, an analysis of what happened in these students’ writing classes and how it affected their writing for those classes.  Teachers’ general practices in the observed courses mainly focused on two aspects of writing: 1) as a communicative act (writing for a reader), and 2) as an exercise in critical thinking (developing a thesis). These two aspects emerged from the observation and interview data collection. The four teachers used very different approaches in designing their courses, and the students in the same classes responded in different ways, mostly depending on their ability to understand their teachers’ intentions and to form appropriate academic identities in an attempt to meet their teachers’ expectations. The analysis of the students’ written texts revealed that students often did not meet the teachers’ expectations of writing objectively and using a genre-appropriate voice as students often resorted to the same authorial voice to push their thesis.  This investigation was designed to inform pedagogic practices for university teachers of academic English and curriculum designers in Japan to establish effective English writing courses. The rich description of classroom practices and resulting written texts and the focus on differences in cultural expectations between teachers and students provide significant contributions to this area of inquiry. The main pedagogical suggestions are standardizing course objectives and goals, assigning more reading as a part of writing, and teaching students how to write authoritatively.</p>

A Comparative Analysis of Reporting Verbs Used in Literature Review Chapters of Bachelor’s and Master’s Theses of Chinese English Majors

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 320-332
Author(s):  
Shuangqing Wen ◽  
Issra Pramoolsook
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Classification Framework ◽  
Literature Reviews ◽  
English Majors ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Practical Implications

Reporting Verbs (RVs), a crucial aspect of citations in academic writing, are used to report the work of other researchers. A Literature Review Chapter, as a key part-genre of any thesis, or a bigger genre where it is embedded, is the main place that has the highest number of RVs. Accordingly, this study aimed to analyze and compare the use of RVs between 30 bachelor’s thesis (BT) Literature Review Chapters and 30 master’s thesis (MT) Literature Review Chapters of Chinese English majors in terms of denotation and evaluation of RVs based on Hyland’s (2002) classification framework. The findings reveal that the RVs used in the BT Literature Reviews were smaller in amount and narrower in range compared with those in the MT counterparts. Regarding the denotation of RVs, Discourse Act RVs were found to be the most predominant in the BT corpus, while Research Act RVs prevailed in the MT corpus. Cognition Act RVs were the least used in the two corpora. Regarding the evaluation of RVs, factive RVs were the most frequently used in the BT Literature Reviews, while non-factive RVs were the most prominent in the MT counterparts. However, negative RVswere infrequent in both corpora. This study would increase the thesis writers’ knowledge on the significance of RVs, raise their awareness of employing RVs, and help them use RVs appropriately and effectively in writing their thesis and other academic writings. This paper also provides practical implications for teaching RVs in preparing research dissertations.

scholarly journals Saudi Arabia EFL university students’ voice on challenges and solution in learning academic writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abdullah Alharbi
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Efl Writing ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Writing Improvement ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Before And After

The present study aims to investigate the difficulties faced by 74 English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduate students in developing a well-written paragraph in academic writing by designing a writing course based on the students’ voices. The self-report survey (5-point Likert scale) was used as the pre- and post-questionnaire, and pre- and the post-tests task was used to track students’ writing improvement before and after taking a writing course. Pre-questionnaire and pre-tests showed that participants had difficulties in using the mechanics of writing (punctuation, spelling, grammar, topic sentences, and supporting sentences). The majority of the students’ responses in the post-survey shows that they believed their writing improved and encountered fewer difficulties in writing as compared to their views in the pre-questionnaire. The result of the post-tests indicates improvements in students’ writing samples. The study concludes that EFL writing courses should be designed on the basis of challenges faced by the students in order to get the best outcome from the course.

Comparability of students’ writing performance on TOEFL iBT and in required university writing courses

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena Llosa ◽  
Margaret E. Malone
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Proficiency ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
Five Dimensions ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Toefl Ibt ◽  
Highly Correlated ◽  
Lower Magnitude

Investigating the comparability of students’ performance on TOEFL writing tasks and actual academic writing tasks is essential to provide backing for the extrapolation inference in the TOEFL validity argument (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008). This study compared 103 international non-native-English-speaking undergraduate students’ performance on two TOEFL iBT® writing tasks with their performance in required writing courses in US universities as measured by instructors’ ratings of student proficiency, instructor-assigned grades on two course assignments, and five dimensions of writing quality of the first and final drafts of those course assignments: grammatical, cohesive, rhetorical, sociopragmatic, and content control. Also, the quality of the writing on the TOEFL writing tasks was compared with the first and final drafts of responses to written course assignments using a common analytic rubric along the five dimensions. Correlations of scores from TOEFL tasks (Independent, Integrated, and the total Writing section) with instructor ratings of students’ overall English proficiency and writing proficiency were moderate and significant. However, only scores on the Integrated task and the Writing section were correlated with instructor-assigned grades on course assignments. Correlations between scores on TOEFL tasks and all dimensions of writing quality were positive and significant, though of lower magnitude for final drafts than for first drafts. The TOEFL scores were most highly correlated with cohesive and grammatical control and had the lowest correlations with rhetorical organization. The quality of the writing on the TOEFL tasks was comparable to that of the first drafts of course assignment but not the final drafts. These findings provide backing for the extrapolation inference, suggesting that the construct of academic writing proficiency as assessed by TOEFL “accounts for the quality of linguistic performance in English-medium institutions of higher education” (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008, p. 21).

scholarly journals An Error Analysis of Research Project Abstracts Written by Thai Undergraduate Students

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Wirada Amnuai
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Word Choice ◽  
Writing Ability ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Sentence Level

Errors in writing are unavoidable while students are trying to develop their writing skills. There have been several studies on identifying writing problems or errors in students’ writing. It is believed that identifying students’ written tasks is an effective tool to explore the difficulties involved in learning language. This helps teachers’ awareness of the serious problems which occur in students’ writing and allows them to pay closer attention to their errors. The aim of the present research study is to pinpoint writing errors in English abstracts written by Thai undergraduate students. Forty abstracts of research projects were collected and analysed. The error analysis was conducted at the sentence level, word level, and mechanics aspect. The five most frequent error types ranking from the most frequent to least frequent were word choice, preposition, sentence construction, singular or plural forms and quotation marks. The findings of the present study have shed light on the students’ writing ability and give an insight into what the problems students face when writing their abstracts. Also, the errors found in the abstracts in the present study have pedagogical implications concerning English language learning, particularly with writing courses. The findings will be helpful for teachers to develop teaching materials to assist their students from committing errors when writing English abstracts and to improve academic writing skills.

scholarly journals Exploring Academic Writing Needs of Indonesian EFL Undergraduate Students

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ratnawati ◽  
Didih Faridah ◽  
Syafiul Anam ◽  
Pratiwi Retnaningdyah
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Private University ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Need Analysis ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
General Skills ◽  
Students Attitudes ◽  
The University

Academic writing is noteworthy competence to be accomplished for English as a foreign language (EFL) students to fulfill their academic needs at the university. To do so, Indonesian tertiary universities accommodate and foster this competence using academic writing course. The study, therefore, sought to look into: 1. what undergraduate EFL students’ perceptions of the importance of academic writing to their current study and future career, 2. what the students’ perceptions of the difficulties of academic writing, 3. what the students’ attitudes towards their previous and future academic writing courses. The present study investigates students’ needs emerging in academic writing during classroom practices to gain insightful and profound perspectives for forthcoming needs of the course. Data were collected through a five scaled questionnaire of need analysis distributed to thirty-four EFL students from a private university, and a focus group interview involving nine participants. Results indicate 61% (Mdifficulties=3.05) of students faced difficulties in both general skills and language problems of academic writing and a new course was expected to provide moves/steps for writing the sections in a research article. The present study then suggests that e-database resources are needed for academic papers models and references hence its efficiency and flexibility in prospective academic writing.

scholarly journals UNIVERSITY STUDENTS� NEEDS OF WRITING COURSE MATERIALS: A CASE OF INDONESIA

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Ilham Ilham ◽  
Bachrudin Musthafa ◽  
Fazri Nur Yusuf
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Private University ◽  
English Language Teaching ◽  
Teaching Writing ◽  
English Department ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Grammar Knowledge

The aim of this study is to explore the target needs (i.e. necessities, lacks and wants) of the students to inform academic writing courses materials. A case study design was employed as this design to provide in-depth data information. To collect the data, questionnaire and interviews were used. Twenty-three undergraduate students of English department at a private university in Mataram West Nusa Tenggara who take academic writing course in the 2019-2020 academic year participated in the study. The result of the study showed that the students need to learn the types of writing texts, vocabulary and construct sentences into paragraph, have good skills in writing different genres since they are lack of grammar knowledge and vocabularies, and improvement on the aspect of teaching writing. This finding may promise implications for updating the current curriculum and materials as practiced for tertiary level English department students in an attempt to keep up with the latest changes in the methodologies of English language teaching. This study recommends that lecturers and universities should conduct a need analysis regularly and updated the curriculum with such insightful needs.

scholarly journals (In)effective Thesis Writing and Supervision: (Lost) Opportunity for Learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-28
Author(s):  
Madhu Neupane Bastika ◽  
Bal Mukunda Bhandari
Keyword(s):  
Student Engagement ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Master's Students ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Thesis Writing ◽  
First Time ◽  
Lost Opportunity

Thesis writing requires a wide range of reading, the skill of critiquing, a good skill of academic writing, and a proper collaboration of student and supervisor; however, it is poorly understood, less explored, and replete with problems. In this paper, we present the merits of thesis writing, supervisors' and students' commonly held perceptions, the effectiveness of supervisory feedback, and the value of student engagement. Then we present two components of thesis writing (i.e., introduction and literature review, including theoretical framework). Considering the need of the novice researchers (i.e., master's students) who are writing their thesis for the first time, we present these two components' introduction and provide suggestions for supervisors. We also present commonly used language features and examples. This paper is expected to be beneficial to students and supervisors alike.

Researching Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality for your Dissertation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mason
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Research Topic ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Master's Students ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Book Covers ◽  
The Uk

This book is based on teaching, supervising and examining Master’s students for over twenty years in three countries: the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It is aimed primarily at Master’s students in English speaking countries, or where English is the language of the classroom. However, it should also be useful to undergraduate students in the related fields of Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality. It may also serve as an introduction to those about to embark on PhD study in these related fields. The key areas that the book covers are: 1 Becoming self-aware of your research capability 2 Developing your formal, academic writing style 3 Selecting and refining your research topic 4 Creating your Literature Review 5 Writing your Methodology 6 Presenting your Results 7 Analysing and Discussing your Results 8 Presenting Conclusions

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