Effect of explicit instruction in expository paragraph writing

Pung, Y. M. E. (2005). Effect of explicit instruction of paragraph writing strategies on PRC students’ expository writing (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://libris.nie.edu.sg/

Background

The author observed that student writers from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) experienced difficulties in expository essays. The author believed that their inability to write expository paragraphs could perhaps be attributed to the Chinese conventions of academic writing they used, which differed from Anglo-American conventions.

Aims

This study investigated the effect of explicit instruction in relation to the cognitive processes and genre practices of expository paragraph writing on the General Paper (GP) essays of PRC students who use English as a second language.

Sample

Thirty-one PRC students from a junior college in Singapore participated in the study.

Method

In the pre-intervention phase, the students were instructed to plan and write a GP essay as a pre-test. In the intervention the students were taught four Anglo-American rhetorical moves: (1) announcing the paragraph-level claim, (2) establishing the paragraph-thesis link, (3) addressing the rhetorical demands in the essay question, and (4) supporting the paragraph-level claim. The teacher explained and modelled the rhetorical moves by thinking aloud, and scaffolded practices with the students. In the post-intervention phase, the students wrote a GP essay based on the same title as their pre-test essay. The pre- and post-intervention essays were analysed and rated based on the presence of the four rhetorical moves.

Findings

The findings showed an increase in the percentage (from 45.2% to 90.3%) of students who indicated their paragraph-level claim within the first third of the paragraph. The percentage of students who could establish paragraph-thesis links increased from 19.4% to 64.5%.

The percentage of students who could decipher what the reader-evaluator expected them to do as implied in the key instruction words in the essay question increased from 22.6% to 67.7%. The percentage of students who supported paragraph-level claims made at the start of the paragraph and pre-empted readers’ needs and expectations of support and adequacy in answer increased from 22.6% to 72.2%.

Implications

The author recommended that explicit instruction be used not only to benefit non-native speakers of English, but also other students who were unfamiliar with academic writing.

Original article retrieved from NIE Digital Repository.