Fostering EFL College Students’ Register Awareness

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ching-Fen Chang
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
Complex Sentence ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Online Writing ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Rigorous Approach ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Efl College Students

This study explores 19 Taiwanese students’ writing in weekly online forum posts and traditional essays. Results drawn from discourse analysis of students’ writing in both types of writing tasks showed that the semester-long online writing accompanied by explicit instruction on essays and basic academic writing conventions appeared to help raise EFL students’ consciousness of register in the two writing contexts and help them make appropriate linguistic adjustments. Quantitative analysis using three measures of syntactic complexity revealed that the students tended to use syntactically more complex sentence structures in essays than in online forums. A number of typical informal or online linguistic features characterize the students’ online forums more frequently than in essays. Finally, although most of these EFL college students seemed able to take different approaches to online writing and essay writing at the end of the semester, some students adopted the same rigorous approach to both types of writing as a result of a strategic response to avoid losing face or being misunderstood when writing in a public domain. The results suggest that providing EFL learners a forum where they can express themselves in less formal language is beneficial.

scholarly journals EFL College Students’ Skill in Using Collocations in Writing Essays

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Dewi Nopita
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
English Education ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Training And Education ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Writing Course ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Efl College Students ◽  
Academic Year

Collocation is a natural order of words in which one word should be attached to another in a particular context. For students who learn English as a foreign language (EFL students), using collocations has been recognized to become a problem. This article is going to describe EFL college students’ skill in using collocations in writing essays. 42 students from the same class were selected. They were the 4th semester students of English Education Study Program at Teacher Training and Education Faculty of UMRAH who took Essay Writing course in the academic year 2019/ 2020. The students were given a take-home assignment to write essays. Then, the essays were analyzed to find out the students’ skill in using collocations. It was found that in using collocation in writing essays, 5 students had excellent skill, 14 students had good skill, and 23 students had low skill. The incorrect use of collocations consisted of lexical and grammatical collocations. Finally, it is hoped that these findings could be a useful input for future Essay Writing course.

scholarly journals Investigating the Use of Hedges in Iraqi EFL College Students’ Essay Writing

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (106) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Asst. Inst : Muna Dalaf
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Significant Feature ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
Efl College Students

Although academic writing is an objective and factual writing, hedges can appear and be used in such writing. In fact, hedges can be considered as a significant feature in such academic writing. The following study is an attempt to explore the awareness of Iraqi EFL college students of hedges usage in their essay writing. The following study follows a comparative method of analyzing the essays of the students. The study is focused on analyzing the essays of the students at the third stage. The result shows that a little number of students use some of the hedge devices, whereas a decent amount of students do not focus on hedges in their essays writing.

scholarly journals Toward an Intercultural Rhetoric: Improving Chinese EFL Students’ Essay Writing through Outline Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Fang Li ◽  
Yingqin Liu
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Intercultural Rhetoric ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
English Academic Writing ◽  
Chinese And English

This study explores the effects of teaching EFL students to use an outline in their English essays. The researchers maintain that using outlines can raise students’ awareness of different audience expectations embedded in the rhetoric of the target language (English) and culture and can improve their English academic writing. The study was based on a four-week long case study at a university in Xi’an, China, in which 24 Chinese EFL students at the College of Translation Studies participated. A discourse analysis was conducted by comparing the Chinese EFL students’ English essays produced at the beginning of the study with those produced at the end of the study after learning and practicing outlining for writing the English essays. Email inquiries were used for understanding the participants’ viewpoints on learning how to write English essay outlines. The findings reveal that teaching EFL students to use outlining in their English essays is an effective way to help them improve their essay writing. Not only can it enhance the students’ understanding about using the English thesis statements, but it can also help improve the use of related, logical, and specific detailed examples to support the main ideas in their essays. The email inquiries also revealed that the students believe that outline learning helped them to understand the differences between Chinese and English essay writing. The implications of the study for intercultural rhetoric are also discussed.

scholarly journals Telegram App in Learning English: EFL Students’ Perceptions

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Zahra A. Abu-Ayfah
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Mobile Device ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Language Learning ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Device Applications ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Efl College Students

The rapid growth of mobile device technology and the emergence of new mobile device applications such as Telegram have created new opportunities for EFL students. Accordingly, the current study investigated the EFL College students’ perceptions of using Telegram for English language learning. The participants of the present study were 300 EFL college students, 200 female and 100 male were selected randomly from the department of English and Translation at Tibah University in AL-Medina AL-Manwarah in Saudi Arabia. This study followed a quantitative approach in which a survey questionnaire was utilized as an instrument for data collection. The results revealed that the majority of EFL students perceived Telegram as a useful tool for English language learning, particularly in vocabulary learning. The findings of the present study may contribute to developing the process of improving learning techniques in higher education in Saudi Arabia.

scholarly journals Investigating Chinese EFL College Students’ Writing Through the Web-Automatic Writing Evaluation Program

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Zongwei Song
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Writing Strategies ◽  
Efl Writing ◽  
Writing Evaluation ◽  
Automated Writing Evaluation ◽  
Vocabulary Richness ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Efl Teachers ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Efl College Students

WWE-pigai is a kind of upgraded automated writing evaluation (AWE) system and there are 444,877,400 essays submitted and corrected on this platform. Some previous research on AWE system indicates that students do not tend to utilize AWE feedback to revise essays and improve writing abilities. The major objective of this study is to investigate Chinese EFL college students’ writing through the comparison of WWE-pigai and traditional writing method. The study lasts two terms and 120 Chinese colleges students participate in the research. The findings reveal that WWE-pigai can motivate EFL students to revise and resubmit their essays more than ten times, improve the scores, increase students’ grammar accuracy and vocabulary richness. The surface-level spelling errors (including punctuation mark misuse) are the most common for freshmen. WWE-pigai is not very effective to correct certain grammatical errors besides spelling and conjugation errors. For certain grammatical errors that the students cannot correct by themselves, the assistance of EFL teachers is necessary. We argue that the results reached through this study can offer useful implications for the usage of EFL writing strategies.

scholarly journals Investigating Iraqi EFL College Students’ Ability of Parametric Resetting

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Mahdi I. Kareem al-Utbi ◽  
Mawj K. Obeid Aljubory
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Negative Transfer ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Grammaticality Judgment ◽  
Null Subject Parameter ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Efl College Students ◽  
Academic Year ◽  
Head Parameter

This paper tries to answer whether Iraqi EFL college students are able to reset the parametric values of their native Arabic into those which suit English. It aims at enhancing Iraqi students' knowledge of some of the parametric values of English via tackling three parameters: Null-subject parameter, Head-parameter, and Serial parameter. To achieve the aim of this study,  Grammaticality Judgment Tasks are administered to sixty students of the fourth year at the Department of English- College of Languages/ University of Baghdad for the academic year 2016-2017. The students' responses have been corrected and statically analysed. The study concludes that Iraqi EFL students' ability to reset parameters varies as to the parameter in question since they have succeeded to reset the Head parameter, but failed to reset the Serial parameter; this is accompanied by a partial ability to rest the Null-subject parameter. As well, it has further been revealed that Iraqi EFL students' inability to reset a parameter is due to negative transfer from Arabic to English, hence EFL learners need be exposed to extensive input data to encourage the resetting of parameters.

scholarly journals Reading Practices of EFL Students: A Survey of Kuwaiti College Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Abdus Sattar Chaudhry ◽  
Amel Al-Adwani
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Basic Education ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Academic Reading ◽  
College And University ◽  
College Of Basic Education ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Good Potential ◽  
Efl College Students ◽  
Applied Education

Reading is important for students by contributing significantly to success in their studies and their career development. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted in the English Department of the College of Basic Education, Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET), in Kuwait. Based on 410 responses of EFL college students in Kuwait on their reading practices, it was found that students read mainly for entertainment, and reading does not appear to be a popular activity among students. Fiction, fashion, and best sellers were the three main types of reading, indicating that academic reading was not a priority. Only a small proportion of students used e-books. Most students perceived such features of e-books as their portability and ability to store more information as likely to attract more students to e-reading, and indicated that they would be attracted to reading e-books themselves if circumstances change. This indicates a good potential to promote e-reading among students if steps are taken to make e-books and e-readers available to them through libraries and academic institutions. E-reading is also expected to become more popular among students if it could be linked to academic reading, particularly to the availability of text books in e-format. Libraries in Kuwait should start more proactive program to promote e-books and e-reading among college and university students.

scholarly journals RHETORICAL PATTERN IN ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY WRITING BY EFL STUDENTS OF IAIN SURAKARTA

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Sujito Sujito ◽  
Wildan Mahir Muttaqien
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Background Information ◽  
Slow Learner ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Fast Learner ◽  
Strong Connectivity ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Thesis Statement

  This study reports pattern of rhetoric in argumentative essay of academic writing accros three achievement categories: fast learner, medium learner, and slow learner.  Descriptive correlation between the  pattern of the rhetoric and overall quality of academic writing was also identified. This research was descriptive study using content analysis approach. The research subjects were 3 classes of semester VII EFL student out of 9 classes selected  in purposive sampling. Pattern of rhetoric in students work was analyzed in seven categories: thesis statement, reservation, background information, rational appeal, affective appeal, conclusion, and hesitation. ESL composition profile by Jacobs was employed  to measure students’ academic argumentative essay. The finding showed that rhetoric pattern categories in three different writing achievers was failed to use. However, strong connectivity between pattern of the seven rhetoric categories and overall quality of academic writing across level of achievement was significantly linked.  

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