Effects of teacher-led collaborative modeling on Chinese EFL learners’ writing development / Li Yang
Among the four language skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading and writing), writing has been recognized as the most challenging skill to master. In order to excel in academic learning, one of the pressing goals for EFL (English as a foreign language) university students is to develop an effe...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Published: |
2023
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| Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15430/2/Li_Yang.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15430/3/Li_Yang.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15430/ |
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| Summary: | Among the four language skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading and writing), writing
has been recognized as the most challenging skill to master. In order to excel in academic
learning, one of the pressing goals for EFL (English as a foreign language) university
students is to develop an effective proficiency in writing, including the writing of
academic texts in their relevant fields of study. Recently, there has been an increased
awareness of the need to better understand the trajectory of EFL students’ writing
development and the role of writing instruction in assisting the students’ efforts to develop
their academic writing skills. However, empirical, detailed and well-designed research on
investigating the efficacy of L2 writing instruction in the Chinese EFL writing classroom
is lacking. Hence, this study aims to address this gap. It examines the effects of teacherled
collaborative modeling, a recent innovation in L2 writing instruction, on Chinese EFL
university students’ L2 writing. This study measures the development of a number of
linguistic features, including syntactic complexity, lexical complexity and language
accuracy, which will be the study’s main contribution. This study also investigates the
EFL students’ perceptions of the new teaching method. In realizing this research aim, this
longitudinal quasi-experimental study adopted an explanatory mixed-methods research
design (QUANàqual). The participants were 60 (N=60) Chinese EFL university students
from two intact English classes. One experimental group received the teacher-led
collaborative modeling approach as pedagogical intervention and one control group did
not receive this type of intervention but follow the regular teaching instruction. In total,
360 written essays produced by the participants were collected at six-time points during
one semester (16 weeks). A post-experiment questionnaire was distributed to the students
in the experimental group to elicit their opinions and perceptions of the novel teaching
method. A semi-structured interview was also conducted to triangulate the findings and deepen the understanding of the students’ perspectives. The data collected from students’
written texts were analyzed quantitatively. Analytical tools such as L2SCA (L2 Syntactic
Complexity Analyzer), Stanford parser, Stanford Tregex, LCA (Lexical Complexity
Analyzer) and Louvain error tagging software were employed to measure the
development of syntactic complexity, lexical complexity and language accuracy in the
students’ written texts. Different statistical analysis tests were conducted to assess the
variance between the two groups. Following this, the data from the post-experiment
questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were analyzed quantitatively and
qualitatively. The findings revealed that the students from the experimental group showed
considerable progress in terms of two, namely, syntactic complexity and language
accuracy, of the three linguistic features assessed in this study. This suggested that the
application of the novel teacher-led collaborative modeling approach might be an
effective teaching approach in the L2 writing classroom. Findings from the postexperiment
survey and semi-structured interviews indicated that, overall, the students had
positive perceptions of the newly introduced pedagogical approach. There are several
other implications regarding the methodological and pedagogical aspects that stem from
the findings.
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