Innovative Approaches in Teaching English Writing to Chinese Speakers by Barry Lee Reynolds Mark Feng Teng

Author:Barry Lee Reynolds, Mark Feng Teng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2020-11-23T13:53:35.964000+00:00

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Discussion

From an ecological perspective (Van Lier 2000), this chapter has sought to explore the development of metacognitive knowledge, if any, in two low-proficiency Hong Kong EFL university student writers in a process writing course. The findings suggest both similarities and variations in their metacognitive knowledge development. In terms of similarities, the two student writers both highlighted the usefulness of student samples in enabling them to understand the features of academic writing, such as the objective writing style and appropriate structure. From an ecological perspective (Van Lier 2000), both students perceived the sample analysis activity to have learning potential. Through engaging in this activity the students developed their text knowledge. The usefulness of sample analysis activity as a classroom affordance is consistent with the finding that engaging students in analyzing and discussing writing samples or exemplars is a useful method to help them understand the genre features (MacArthur, Philippakos, and Ianetta 2014), although weak students such as Sally needed greater teacher scaffolding in this activity to acquire text knowledge. The sample analysis activity as a classroom affordance also resonates with Lam’s (2015) finding that the teaching of genre knowledge within a process-oriented course can contribute to the development of text knowledge, demonstrating the importance of integrating process and genre considerations within a process-oriented course.

However, both of the students needed to further develop their text knowledge. For instance, classroom affordances related to genre instruction needed to be created for Sally so that in addition to knowing the “what” of the text, she would also understand the “why” of the structure of academic papers. In Katrina’s case, classroom affordances were necessary for her to understand different text strategies to create a formal tone rather than relying on just copying sentence patterns from the sample essay. Such affordances also needed to equip students with audience awareness, because neither student had explicitly stated their concern for audience, which may be attributed to the fact that EFL students are inclined to treat their teacher as the only reader of their writing (Victori 1999). One way to address the aforementioned problems is to use classroom affordances to highlight the importance of the audience and the purpose of the text, how these elements determined textual features of the writing, and text strategies to achieve these features.

Both students also needed to understand how to integrate text knowledge with strategy use. While talking about the use of planning strategies, for example, neither student stated how they took the initiative to pay attention to the rhetorical features of the academic papers (e.g., organization, purpose, and audience). This implies that teachers need to create appropriate learning resources or activities (e.g., outline template containing questions about concerns for textual features, self-evaluation form) that enable thier students to apply text knowledge while utilizing writing strategies such as planning and revising (Teng, 2020).

The two students also demonstrated similarity in the development of metacognitive awareness concerning evaluation. Both students realized the importance of self-evaluation and revision subsequent to teacher-student dialogical interactions. It seems that the students

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