scholarly journals Effective Use of Peer-feedback in Developing Academic Writing Skills of Undergraduate Students

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Yi Yi Mon ◽  
Subhan Zein
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Peer Feedback ◽  
Effective Use

Enhancing and supporting the role of academic tutors in developing undergraduate writing skills: Reflections on the experiences of a social work education programme

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Hughes ◽  
Sue Wainwright ◽  
Caroline Cresswell
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Academic Support ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Education Programme ◽  
Independent Study ◽  
Learning Needs ◽  
Consistent Manner ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Work Education

Whilst approaches to the development of undergraduate academic writing skills vary between disciplines and institutions, academic tutors are consistently presented as playing an important role. One aspect of this role is supporting students to engage effectively with feedback in order to develop consciousness and competence regarding academic writing. This article reports on the use of a form, which was designed to encourage students to use feedback in a structured and consistent manner and to support subsequent tutor-tutee dialogue. Students and tutors who used the form suggest it encouraged students to reflect on their learning needs and identify priority issues for discussion with the tutor. However, barriers to its effective use remain. In particular, there was resistance amongst students to accessing academic support, due to anxieties that staff would look negatively upon those who seek help. Students expressed concern that tutors would perceive those seeking support as failing to cope with the demands of independent study, a set of skills they perceive that they were required to have on arrival at university, rather than to acquire during the course of their studies with the help and guidance of their academic tutor.

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 Teaching Writing in EAP Contexts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viorica Condrat
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Process Development ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Teaching Writing ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Discourse Community ◽  
State University ◽  
Efl Students

Academic writing is a particular type of scholarly interaction which signals the writer’s affiliation to a specific discourse community. Developing academic writing skills should become a priority for higher education. This paper describes a small-scale study which investigates the role of blogging in developing academic writing skills in undergraduate students. Blogging is viewed as a platform where the scholarly interaction between members of the same discourse community can take place. The paper is based on the survey data and observation during the experiment conducted at Alecu Russo Balti State University of Moldova. It reports on how EFL students reacted to the use of blogs for academic writing tasks. The findings suggest that students seem to have a positive attitude to blogging pointing out to such benefits as: enhanced self-efficacy, awareness of the writing process, development of reader awareness, increased responsibility for the quality of the writing. We argue that blogging can yield significant improvement in undergraduate students’ academic writing.

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.

Using gamification to develop academic writing skills in dental undergraduate students

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maha El Tantawi ◽  
Shazia Sadaf ◽  
Jehan AlHumaid
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Skills

Write on the edge: using a chemistry corpus to develop academic writing skills resources for undergraduate chemists

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. L. Bruce ◽  
P. K. Coffer ◽  
S. Rees ◽  
J. M. Robson
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Scientific Literacy ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
English For Academic Purposes ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Use Of Data ◽  
Chemistry Research ◽  
Second Language Pedagogy

Many undergraduate students find the production of an extended piece of academic writing challenging. This challenge is more acute in the sciences where production of extended texts is infrequent throughout undergraduate studies. This paper reports the development of a new English for Academic Purposes (EAP) workshop and associated resources for third year undergraduate chemists to support their dissertation module. The workshop is designed to utilise a searchable database of student texts (a corpus) developed as part of the FOCUS project at Durham University. This novel use of data-driven learning (DDL), common in second language pedagogy, transfers well to the chemistry classroom as the processes of research and discovery (of words rather than chemicals) involved in DDL parallel similar processes in chemistry research. Our workshop and online consolidation activities have been positively evaluated by both staff and our current cohort of students. The project is being rolled out across other departments at Durham as well as the corpus tool being utilised at other UK HEIs. This corpus-based approach to academic writing in chemistry offers a unique perspective on the interplay between language and scientific literacy.

scholarly journals Written Feedback In Second Language Writing: Perceptions Of Vietnamese Teachers And Students

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Phuong Anh Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Peer Feedback ◽  
L2 Writing ◽  
Written Feedback ◽  
Teachers Perceptions ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Teachers And Students

<p>Writing can be very challenging for ESL students since they need to overcome the changes associated with academic writing styles and their mechanics in order to improve their writing skills (Hyland & Hyland, 2006). In Vietnam, English is known as a foreign language in all public and private schools, and writing is a compulsory component. It is unavoidable that students will make errors in their writing development process, and feedback is a fundamental requirement to reduce these errors. Even if giving feedback costs a great deal of time, it can be the most significant investment of writing instructors (Ferris, 2002). In the last 20 years, many studies have examined a wide range of issues in academic writing, including the types of feedback, and stakeholders’ perceptions about feedback; however, the results have been contradictory. Mahmud (2016) revealed that teachers are often forced to use their own writing experience and intuitive criteria due to the lack of information on how to give feedback. Nevertheless, researchers tend to focus on either students’ or teachers’ perceptions, or both teachers’ and students’ perceptions, about different types of feedback in writing (Atmaca, 2016). In Vietnam, there are few studies about students’ and teachers’ perceptions of written feedback. This study investigated the views of both Vietnamese students and teachers on peer feedback, direct feedback, indirect coded feedback, indirect un-coded feedback, and self-feedback to fulfil the gap.  Thirty-six university students in Finance and Banking and two senior English teachers participated in this study. Due to the unexpected pandemic, the researcher changed the study from in-class to online. This qualitative research employs questionnaires and interviews. The pre-questionnaire in class before the outbreak of coronavirus in Vietnam, but the rest of the questionnaire surveys and interviews were collected online because the school had shut down. The students were grouped into two separate online groups on Facebook with their classmates, and they were asked to complete five surveys about five different types of feedback. The findings revealed some similarities between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of feedback in L2 writing. In terms of similarities, both teachers and students agreed that feedback played an important role in L2 writing learning and teaching. Teachers and students believed that feedback could affect L2 learners’ cognitive engagement in writing and some types of feedback could affect learners’ psychology. Moreover, training was necessary to improve peer feedback in both quality and quantity of feedback and to help students use this type of feedback more effectively. The results from teachers’ interviews and students’ surveys also revealed the discrepancies between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of feedback in L2 writing. This study concludes that using appropriate types of teacher feedback can boost students’ confidence to improve their writing skills in the long term.</p>

A Student Perspective of Plagiarism

2011 ◽  
pp. 10-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Zimitat
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Classroom Practice ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Student Perspective ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
Borderline Cases ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Writing Processes ◽  
Work Samples

This paper reports on an Australian study of undergraduate students’ engagement in plagiarism-related behaviours, their knowledge of plagiarism and their academic writing skills. Students were surveyed to: (i) estimate the incidence of plagiarism behaviours; (ii) examine students’ self-reported academic writing skills; (iii) their knowledge of plagiarism; and (iv) their ability to identify plagiarised work. Across all three undergraduate years, approximately 90% of students believed that direct copying of text or ideas without acknowledgement constituted plagiarism, whilst around 5% were unsure if it constituted plagiarism. The majority of students (80% or more) claimed never to have plagiarized. About 80% of undergraduate students said they possessed the skills of note-taking, paraphrasing, citing and referencing etc., but barely half of students in each year group reported confidence with these skills. Students were able to distinguish between clear-cut cases of plagiarism and paraphrasing when presented with either different writing processes or different work samples, but they were less able to distinguish between “borderline cases”. There are clear implications for classroom practice. First, students need the opportunity to practice and develop their academic writing skills, in the context of articulating their understandings of their own discipline. This requires teachers to recognise that academic writing is a developmental skill and to learn how to improve the writing skills of their students. Second, in this process, teachers need to ensure that students are inducted into the conventions of the academy that relate to the use, manipulation and transformation of knowledge.

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