scholarly journals Exploring academic identities of EFL novice writers

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Juliaty
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Academic Identities ◽  
Writing Culture ◽  
Novice Writers ◽  
Writing Practice

In academic writing, undergraduate EFL learners are not required only to apply correct L2 writing system, but more profoundly, construct and convey ideas in ways recognised in their discipline as they continuously create and recreate identities as members of their academic community. Such a process of identity construction shapes EFL novice writers’ characteristics and nurture their growth as writers in the academic environment. This study, thus, aims to explore the portrayal of academic identities of undergraduate EFL novice writers. Eight Indonesian undergraduate students of an English Department in a private Indonesian university participated in this study. The data collected included an autobiography journal, a semi-structured interview and two essay assignments. The data were analysed qualitatively by employing Ivanič’s (1998) concept of writer identity, consisting of autobiographical self, discoursal self and authorial self, and Hyland’s (2010) metadiscourse model. The findings reveal that despite numerous writing repertoires applied to display aspects of autobiographical, discoursal and authorial selves in the learners’ academic writing, the portrayal of academic identities in the writing is overall weak due to the struggles that the learners faced in adjusting and engaging themselves in the academic community of their discipline. Some recommendations in relation to L2 academic writing practice for EFL undergraduate students include facilitating students to have more exposure and access into L2 academic writing culture and academic community of their discipline.

scholarly journals Get a Room! How Writing Groups Aid the Development of Junior Academics’ Writing Practice and Writer Identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Jenny Mattsson ◽  
Emma-Karin Brandin ◽  
Ann-Kristin Hult
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Writing Groups ◽  
Writer Identity ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Writing Group ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The University ◽  
Writing Practice

The present study revisits writing retreat participants who have spontaneously formed writing groups before or after attending a retreat hosted by the Unit for Academic Language at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. All in all, 11 doctoral students and 1 post doc were interviewed using a semi-structured interview model. The answers were thematically analysed based on Murray’s (2014) concept of coherence in writing groups as well as parts of Aitchison and Lee’s (2006) key characteristics of writing groups. The two main research questions posed concern (i) whether the informants have changed their writing practice and/or the way they think and feel about writing since joining a writing group, and (ii) whether possible changes have aided the development of their identity as academic writers. Results show that the informants have indeed changed central aspects of their writing practice and that this in turn has positively influenced how they now think and feel about writing. This has to some extent contributed to the informants’ development of their writer identity; however, the present study also sheds light on the fact that more needs to be done at departmental levels across the university to make academic writing visible.

scholarly journals Voices from EFL Thai learners towards English writing

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 1495-1507
Author(s):  
Chutamas Sundrarajun
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Educational Organizations ◽  
Business English ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Language Writing ◽  
Written Assignments

English language writing is seen as one of the most difficult skills for undergraduate students. When composing a piece of writing, students usually face various problems ranging from grammatical aspects to expressing ideas and opinions. To answer the research questions, this study employed a mixed method of both qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify the students’ perceptions towards Business Article Writing Course, as well as to pinpoint their challenges when working on the written assignments. The intensive data were collected from 20 fourth year students majoring in Business English via the use of questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The findings give teachers, course designers, and educational organizations an insight into students’ problems in learning English language writing. It also highlights the need to integrate different genres of writing to enhance students’ writing skills so that they can use such techniques to overcome any struggles when composing a piece of writing.   Keywords:  Academic Writing, EFL, Writing Strategies, Peer Feedback

Voices from the margins: narratives of learning development in a Digital Age

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Abegglen ◽  
Tom Burns ◽  
Sandra Sinfield
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Exclusionary Practices ◽  
The People ◽  
Second Year ◽  
Learning Development ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Writing Practice

This paper explores how to facilitate the ‘bedding in’ and ‘becoming of’ undergraduate students who come from non-traditional backgrounds and struggle with what is, for them, the often alien world of academic writing and assessment.  To achieve their aims, the authors set up a partnership between the students of a second-year Peer Mentoring module and those of a first-year Becoming an Educationalist one.  By means of this creative partnering, and via reflective blog entries, they worked to harness quasi-academic writing to help such first-year students to become familiar with, and powerful within, the exclusionary practices (in particular, the written conventions of academic essays) of Higher Education.  They argue that this innovative ‘teaming-up’ of second- and first-year students not only models collaborative learning and writing practice, but also facilitates the ‘bedding-in’ of newcomers.  The paper itself models the partnership and creative writing methods used to help students find their ‘voice’ by being ‘co-produced’ by the people teaching across the two modules concerned.

scholarly journals Investigating writing difficulties in essay writing: Tertiary students’ perspectives

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Suhaimah Bulqiyah ◽  
Moh. Arif Mahbub ◽  
Dyah Ayu Nugraheni
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Writing Difficulties ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Language And Education ◽  
Cognitive Problems

This study is primarily designed for investigating the tertiary students’ perspectives on the writing difficulties of essays. This study was conducted in explanatory research in which quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from the web-based questionnaire and semi-structured interview, then analyzed separately. 21 undergraduate students have enrolled in the survey and 6 of them were invited to the interview section. This research reveals tertiary students' problems in essay writing course are categorized into: affective problems which raise from students’ and lecturers’ attitude while teaching and learning Essay Writing Course, cognitive problems that considered as the difficulties in the areas of writing viewpoint, transferring language, and the process of writing, and linguistic problems in the area of lexico-grammar, vocabulary, and the structure of the essay. Due to the findings, those aspects of academic writing should be serious attention for both EFL students and teachers to overcome the problems. The findings of this study have implications for EFL writing course designers as basic data of material improvement and for researchers particularly in the realms of language and education.

A mathematical model for academic genre awareness

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 469-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Muñoz-Luna ◽  
Lidia Taillefer
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Production Quality ◽  
Academic English ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Genre Awareness ◽  
English Academic Writing ◽  
Academic Genre

Spanish undergraduates of English Studies are required to submit their essays in academic English, a genre which most of them are not acquainted with. This paper aims to explore the extralinguistic side of L2 academic writing, more specifically, the combination of metalinguistic items (e.g. transition and frame markers, among others) with writers’ awareness of academic genre features. The research sample conveys a group of 200 Spanish undergraduates of English Studies; they are in their fourth year, so they are expected to be proficient in English academic writing but their written production quality varies considerably. Results are analysed following a mixed methodology by which metalinguistic items are statistically measured, and then contrasted with semi-structured interview results; SPSS® and NVivo® provide quantitative and qualitative outcomes, respectively. The analyses reveal that undergraduate students who produce complex sentences and more coherent texts show greater awareness of academic genre features, being able to (un)consciously employ academic language in their written expression. These high-scoring students make more proficient use of complex transition markers for coherence and frame markers for textual cohesion.

scholarly journals Learner Corpus and Academic Writing: Identifying the Error Patterns of Taiwanese EFL Students

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Hsiao-I Hou
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Curriculum Design ◽  
Writing Curriculum ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Learner Corpus ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Lexical Errors

<p>The purpose of this study is to find practical implications for improving academic writing curriculum design by exploring lexical and grammatical errors produced by EFL learners in a vocational institution in Taiwan. To satisfy this purpose, a small learner corpus was compiled in this study. The data were obtained from 58 undergraduate students of a public vocational university from September 2012 to June 2013 in Taiwan. There are 112 essays in the corpus that include 34,426 tokens. Learner errors were annotated based on the error categories found in (Dagneaux et al, 1996). Transfer errors and intralingual errors were analyzed. Lexical Tutor and AntConc software were used to conduct the analyses. Lexical errors, including incorrect word choices, misspellings, and word insertions, deletions or replacements occurred primarily due to students’ insufficient mastery of vocabulary. The top three grammatical errors were verb forms, article errors, and preposition errors. Based on the research results, pedagogical implications that focus on teaching EAP writing to vocational university students in Taiwan are discussed.</p>

scholarly journals Understanding the Sustainable Growth of EFL Students’ Writing Skills: Differences between Novice Writers and Expert Writers in Their Use of Lexical Bundles in Academic Writing

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5553
Author(s):  
Shaojie Zhang ◽  
Hui Yu ◽  
Lawrence Jun Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Sustainable Growth ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Student Writing ◽  
Student Writers ◽  
Lexical Bundles ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
Novice Writers

Lexical bundles, as building blocks of discourse, play vital roles in helping members from the same academic community achieve successful communication and disseminate sustainable disciplinary knowledge. However, little attention has been paid to lexical bundles in postgraduate writing. Drawing on Biber et al.’s (1999) structural taxonomy and Hyland’s (2008a) functional taxonomy, we identified and compared lexical bundles in two self-built corpora, an EFL student writing corpus and an expert writing corpus. The results indicate considerable structural differences between the two groups: the student writers used verb phrase-based bundles more frequently and prepositional phrase-based and noun phrase-based bundles less frequently. In terms of function, although the two academic groups showed similar distributions of the three main functional categories, as student writers they exhibited insufficient reader-awareness and incomplete knowledge of stance expressions. It is hoped that the findings will shed light on future pedagogical practices to help novice writers improve their academic writing competence as a sustainable goal in enhancing their academic scholarship.

scholarly journals Exploring Self-Mention in The Yemeni EFL Argumentative Writing Across Three Proficiency Levels

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Alward
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
First Person ◽  
Argumentative Writing ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Proficiency Levels ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
University Level

Self-mention used by university-level Yemeni writers is regarded as a challenging task. The overuse use of this feature is often considered as less formal and objective in academic writing. Despite the significance of this feature in academic writing, previous studies were mostly conducted in the Western cultural context. Research on self-mention produced by EFL learners of Arabic cultural background seems to be overlooked. Therefore, this study aimed to explore and compare the use of the first-person pronouns across three proficiency levels in an argumentative paragraph written by 80 third-year undergraduate students. Data were collected, assessed by ELT specialists, and then quantitatively analyzed. The results revealed that Yemeni EFL learners make extensive use of the first-person pronouns in their argumentative paragraphs. Differences were found in the occurrences of the first-person pronouns across three proficiency levels. The results also indicated that learners with a high proficiency level tend to use the first-person pronouns less than learners at low and intermediate proficiency levels. Since low-proficient learners rely more on the use of the first-person pronouns than those at higher levels, learners need to be exposed to a variety of strategies of how they can project their voice appropriately in their written texts.

scholarly journals Arab EFL Learners’ Perspectives on L1 Influence: Factors and Constraints

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Elham Salem Al-makatrah
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Influence Factors ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
L1 Influence ◽  
L1 And L2 ◽  
Arabic Speaking

This paper aims at examining the factors that cause L1 influence from the perspectives of adult native-Arabic speaking learners of English. It also reports on the possible constraints on L1 influence and further delves into the role of Psychotypology. Despite the recognition of the importance of L2 learners’ perspectives regarding the influence of their L1 and the factors contribute to such influence; this topic is an understudied area in the context of native-Arabic speaking learners of English. A semi-structured interview and a rewrite test were conducted with 40 undergraduate students at a public university, Jordan, where they were classified into two groups of 20 students each: beginner group and advanced group. The findings indicate that there are various causes of L1 influence including the peculiarity and complexity of some L2 structures/features as well as L1 –L2 structural differences. Learners’ psychotypological assessment of what is a similar, different, marked and unmarked structure across L1 and L2 is one of the restrictions on L1 influence. Moreover, Learners’ psychotypological assessment also varies depending on the learners’ L2 proficiency levels. The findings of this study can provide important insights into the research that considers various factors of the overall process of second language acquisition.

Mobile-assisted vocabulary learning: Investigating receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge of Chinese EFL learners

ReCALL ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Yan Li ◽  
Christoph A. Hafner
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Vocabulary Learning ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
Mobile Platforms ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Learning Group ◽  
Chinese University ◽  
L2 Vocabulary

Abstract Considerable research has been conducted on the advancement of mobile technologies to facilitate vocabulary learning and acquisition in a second language (L2). However, whether mobile platforms lead to a comprehensive mastery of both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge has seldom been addressed in previous literature. This study investigated English vocabulary learning from engagement with mobile-based word cards and paper word cards in the context of the Chinese university classroom. A total of 85 undergraduate students were recruited to take part in the study. The students were divided into two groups, a mobile learning group and a paper-based learning group, and tested on two word knowledge components: receptive knowledge of the form–meaning connection and productive knowledge of collocations. Both the digital and non-digital word cards enhanced L2 vocabulary learning, and the results showed that the mobile application (app) promoted greater gains than physical word cards.

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