scholarly journals Promoting EFL students’ critical thinking and self-voicing through CIRC technique in Academic Writing courses

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 917-934
Author(s):  
Andi Susilo ◽  
Restu Mufanti ◽  
Aris Fitriani
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Education ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Student Centered ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Education Data ◽  
Efl Students

Critical thinking and self-voicing are two demanding skills that facilitate students to produce concise, authorial academic texts. While most writing programs and research have paid much attention to improving students’ writing achievement, less attention is given to promote these two skills in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classrooms. This article reports a classroom-based study investigating the use of the Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC) technique to promote EFL students’ academic writing skills. It particularly examines how the CIRC technique helps to foster students’ critical and self-voicing stance in developing argumentative texts. A participatory qualitative study was employed, involving 64 undergraduate students majoring in English Education. Data were generated from the participants’ writing portfolios, observations, and the teacher’s reflections. The collected data were managed, classified, and analyzed using NVivo 12 to elicit the emerging themes. Drawing on the qualitative content analysis, the results showed that the CIRC technique helped to shape the participants’ critical thinking and self-voicing skills which were consistently demonstrated during the student-centered activities and their writing results. The participants could engage in productive writing processes, such as critical reading, note-taking, summarizing, drafting and revising composition, peer-reviewing, and other related collaborative skills. The findings indicated that the development of students’ critical thinking and self-voicing skills simultaneously affected the quality of their academic writing texts.

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.

Writing Strategies Used by Indonesian EFL Students with Different English Proficiency

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Dian Fajrina ◽  
John Everatt ◽  
Amir Sadeghi
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
English Education ◽  
English Proficiency ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Receptive Vocabulary ◽  
Writing Strategies ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Efl Students

The present study investigates the writing strategies used by 135 Indonesian English Foreign Language undergraduate students with different English proficiency and the relationship between their English proficiency, indicated by students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge, and the quality of text they produced. The writing strategies questionnaire by Petrić and Czárl (2003) was used to analyze participants’ use of strategies in the three stages of writing: pre-writing, drafting, and revising. Each item in the questionnaire was rated on a 5-point Likert scale. The Vocabulary Size Test (Nation & Beglar, 2007) was used as an indicator of participants’ proficiency in English. The participants were also asked to write an essay in English, which was assessed using the ESL Composition Profile of Jacob et al. (1981). The results of the data analysis showed that most of the students applied 15 of the 38 strategies referred to in the questionnaire. Results also indicate no significant differences in the choice of strategies between students with high versus low English proficiency levels. However, participants’ vocabulary size had only a weak positive correlation with their writing quality. The findings aim primarily to inform Writing courses in English Education majors in Indonesia, though they may also be useful for other English learning contexts.

scholarly journals ANALYSIS OF EFL STUDENTS’ CITATION PRACTICES AND PROBLEMS IN ACADEMIC WRITING

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Yanti Sri Rezeki
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Education ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
State University ◽  
Education Department ◽  
West Kalimantan ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Problems ◽  
Citation Practices

Abstract: Citing sources correctly is vital in academic writing including research proposals. Despite its significance, students seem to perform it poorly due to lack of knowledge and awareness of its role in their writing. As the result, they are often accused of committing plagiarism. One of the ways to prevent students from committing plagiarism is by providing them with sufficient knowledge and skills related to proper citations. This study is a preliminary effort to identify student citation practices within the English Education department of a state university in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Employing qualitative content analysis, the researcher examined samples of students’ proposals to describe the ways in which citations were written and the common problems that occurred. The findings suggest that students mostly cited as non-integral/non-reporting. The study also reveals that students’ most common mistakes in the citation are found in language and content. The study concludes with the need to provide students with clear guidelines for citation and strong remarks on plagiarism.

BEYOND CRITICAL THINKING IN ACADEMIC WRITING: A DISCOURSE PERSPECTIVE

JURNAL BASIS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Misdi Misdi
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Education ◽  
Private University ◽  
Research Proposal ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Research Journal ◽  
Proposal Writing

The phenomenon of critical thinking, as one aspect of learning experiences, is challenging. Yet, it reflects students’ ideas and understanding of particular matters, especially in academic writing among the English education institutions. Thus, this study was aimed to investigate how undergraduate students fashioned their understanding of being self-driven in writing research proposal relating to reading skills. The research questions drop into two big areas: 1) How is critical thinking reflected in research proposal writing, 2) What are evidences of being critical in addressing research proposal? Having three sessions of in-depth interview, fifty seven students of English department of a private university in West Java, Indonesia were involved in the reflection of their writing and reading experiences during the study. The data were collected through interview and document observation. The findings suggest that first, the critical writing is reflected by such citation and elaborative sentences as the distinctive writing features of academic writing. Second, the extended description and elaboration are made due to reading constraint. Books are mainly the sources, whereas research journal articles are still less appreciated. Thus, reading is defines as the evidence of being critical. The results of the study play significant contribution in building critical thinking, critical reading, and critical writing as self-awareness manifesto among the students of English education.

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>

scholarly journals EFL students’ responses to learning basic reading and writing skills

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syayid Sandi Sukandi ◽  
Dian Noviani Syafar
Keyword(s):  
English Education ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Basic Reading Skills ◽  
West Sumatra ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Teaching Learning

This research presents the responses from Indonesian EFL students to teaching-learning basic reading and writing skills in the context of Indonesian higher education. The 120 respondents, who completed questionnaires, were students enrolled in Writing 1 and Reading 2 courses in the English Education Study Program of the Teachers Academy in West Sumatra [STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat]. There were four findings from the survey, namely: 1) EFL students preferred studying reading (37%) more than writing (27%), 2) EFL students read about the same amount of literary texts (25%) as they did popular texts (23%) and academic texts (22%), 3) grammar and spelling are the most difficult aspects for EFL students to learn with 33% having difficulty with basic reading skills, and 53% with basic writing skills, and finally 4) EFL students prefer to open a dictionary when they encounter difficult words in reading a text (62%) and do the same when they have difficulties in expressing their thoughts in writing English (38%). These findings show that EFL students have a variety of responses in terms of learning basic reading and writing in EFL English. In addition, the findings show that the tendency of EFL students to prefer reading to writing is relatively high.

The language of quoting in academic writing

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lieke Verheijen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Lexical Items

Because quotation is a fundamental aspect of academic texts, this corpus study examines the language of quoting in (L2) academic writing. To find out whether there are subtle linguistic differences in the use of quotation by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and professional academics who are native speakers of English (NSE), I compare two corpora of scholarly writings: one by upper intermediate and advanced EFL students and one by NSE experts. 1201 Quotes were extracted from the writings and examined for a broad range of lexico-grammatical features relevant to using quotes, including introductions to quotes, lexical items in introducing quotes, ‘special’ quotes, and punctuation surrounding quotes. The findings make clear that EFL students and NSE experts differ significantly on various points in their language of quoting. Making students aware of these differences could make their academic writing more professional, native-like, and sophisticated.

scholarly journals Reformulation, text modeling, and the development of EFL academic writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Teguh Sulistyo ◽  
Dwi Fita Heriyawati
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Efl Writing ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Writing Class ◽  
Efl Students

<p>This paper mainly investigates the benefits of the implementation of Reformulation and Text Modelling in an EFL writing setting. Reformulation and Text Modeling (henceforth RTM) is intended to help EFL students understand better how to write academic texts to make their texts sound as nativelike as possible. Therefore, RTM was implemented in a writing class in which 35 students participated as the respondents of the study. They were treated with RTM and their essays were then analyzed to examine the effects of the implementation of RTM on their writing products. Besides, this study investigated further the students’ perception towards RTM in EFL writing settings. The findings of this study proved that RTM is beneficial to improve students’ writing performances and students have positive perceptions on RTM. The implications of the findings for language learning are also discussed.</p>

scholarly journals Peer Feedback in Writing through Georgian EFL Undergraduate Students’ Eyes

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariam MERKVILADZE
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Classroom Environment ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Peer Feedback ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
The Subject

Throughout the years educators, educational experts, teachers and tutors have been in the constant search of effective ways of teaching and assessing writing. The views about assessment of writing have encountered changes over the years. Therefore, feedback has become one of the fundamental aspects of teaching and learning writing. Peer feedback is one of the special ways to share the knowledge about writing and at the same time to contribute to creating the learner-oriented classroom environment within which students become active participants of their own path of learning writing. The primary objective of the present study is to investigate Georgian higher educational institutions’ (HEIs’) undergraduate EFL students’ perception of peer feedback and its role in the process of developing their writing skills. The findings of the present study show that peer feedback is appealing for the learners, since they believe it develops their critical-thinking and self-reviewing skills and gives them the sense of active participation. However, the present research has also revealed that the elements of friendship-related bias need special attention and should be the subject of further research in that field. 

scholarly journals Undergraduate Students’ Self-Efficacy Strategies in Writing Academic Papers

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Anne Yustica Pramesti Sumarsono ◽  
Concilianus Laos Mbato
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
English Education ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Writing Anxiety ◽  
Writing Class ◽  
High Sense

This study explored the writing self-efficacy of English education undergraduates at Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta. Nowadays, many students still have not used self-efficacy in their studies. Consequently, they may encounter difficulties when working on tasks. As a result, the scores obtained are not the highest. Which may make them lack the motivation to learn. The purpose of this research was to determine the application of self-efficacy in writing works for the undergraduate course of English Education at Sanata Dharma University. The research question was: How can undergraduate students of the English Education Study Program manage self-efficacy and writing anxiety to complete the academic writing class? This research adopted qualitative methods making use of the Likert scale and interviews. The questionnaire was distributed to Sanata Dharma University’s undergraduates who had received English courses in reading literary works. The results show that undergraduates have a high sense of self-efficacy, can complete academic writing on time, and we are motivated by their internal and surrounding environments.

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