Academic literature on the topic 'English language English language Report writing College prose'

<p>Writing is a complex process that requires advanced linguistic skills. Although many college students studied English as a foreign language (EFL) for twelve years in preparatory and high schools, they still face major problems in producing correct writings that meet their colleges’ requirements. Students’ problems include inability to generate ideas, organize discourse, control sentence structures, choose appropriate vocabulary, and use effective styles. A potential solution to such problems can be found in the application of modern technologies in the classrooms. Telecommunication technologies which include synchronous and asynchronous communication have provided various tools that can be used to assist EFL students to learn writing skills. Therefore, the current quantitative, quasi-experimental study aimed at examining the effect of asynchronous communication, specifically digital dialogued journaling on students’ writing skills. Digital dialogued journaling includes blogs, webpages, discussion forms, or word-processed applications such as Google documents. Using the platform of Google documents, the present study attempted to provide new strategies for teaching writing courses at higher education to help EFL students develop their writing skills. Data was collected from undergraduate students in the College of Languages and Translation, at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Data collection depended on a number of instruments: First, a pretest was used to measure the participants’ level of writing before implementing the teaching strategies of dialogued journaling. Secondly, an online dialogued journal, designed by the researcher using Google documents, was employed for the experiment. The journal was sent to the same sample via emails, and the participants posted their reflective writings on different issues regarding their academic journey learning English. Students’ interactive dialogues included prose writing, descriptive and argumentative paragraphs, poetry, and their personal stories. The students-teacher dialogues made the corpus data which enabled investigating the effectiveness of dialogued journaling on improving students’ writing. Thirdly, a posttest was used to collect data regarding the degree of change that occurred as a result of the experiment. Fourthly, a Likert scale questionnaire was used at the end of the experiment to identify the participants’ levels of satisfaction with dialogued journaling. Data analysis was based on using the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to compare the results of pretest and posttest. A rubric with five scale criteria was used to examine each rank of students’ writing, and to report each student’s score before and after treatment. The Text Analyzer Software was also employed to examine the participant’s writing lexical density and phrase frequencies. Data analysis results indicated a significant statistical difference between the overall writing scores of the pretest and the posttest. Moreover, the examination of the participants’ writing revealed much improvement in writing styles, word choice, and the student’s voice, which are critical factors in writing. Hence, the significance of the current study is that it provides a new technological tool, such as Google document, for teaching writing skills at higher education. This study includes an instructional model that incorporates digital journaling into teaching English writing. The present research is also a contribution in the field of teaching English, adopting the communicative approach by integrating theories of connectives and constructivism into linguistic theories. <strong></strong></p>

Though scholars interested in ESL writing pedagogy would like to believe otherwise, most students in high school and college English language courses are not, in fact, required to write academic prose. Rather they are, by and large, asked to write the personal narrative, a genre of prose similar in very fundamental ways to the prototype story. The personal narrative is a challenge because, like the prototype story, it is more than a mere report of events in past time. It is a report of events in past time infused with, what has been identified as the defining component of the story, the evaluative component. The evaluative component enables the writer to represent the dissimilar impact of successive narrative events to the developing theme. In this paper, I will address one significant means of signaling the dissimilar impact of successive narrative events, and the problems learners have with its proper use. In the prototype personal narrative/ story, the temporal movement effected by successive narrative events is not the same. There is non-uniformity in the pace and quality, of the temporal movement, from one narrative event to the next. I will provide a description of the sentence-level mode of implementing this particular means of evaluation in the prose of skilled writers, and examine a representative sample of ESL data to show the difficulty learners face with its implementation. This understanding will be used to generate suggestions for pedagogy which specifically address this area of difficulty.

In this article we report on a pilot project investigating the presentation of speech, writing and thought in Early Modern English prose fiction and news writing. The aim of the project is to determine whether discourse presentation changes diachronically and what the function of the various discourse presentation categories were in the Early Modern period. To study this we have built and annotated a small corpus of Early Modern English writing using the model of speech, writing and thought presentation outlined in Semino & Short (2004). We are thus able to compare our findings against those of Semino and Short for Present Day English writing. The quantitative results of our pilot study and our initial qualitative analyses lead to a number of hypotheses which we suggest are suitable for testing on a larger corpus of data.

English writing is regarded as the most difficult task by Chinese EFL learners. Due to the existing problems in present college English writing instruction, teachers fail to provide effective guidance in students’ writing process and students report a low level of motivation and confidence in writing tasks. Through purposeful reading discussions driven by writing tasks, students are provided with sufficient opportunities to receive language input. Reading-to-writing activities, based on output-driven hypothesis, help students consolidate and internalize linguistic and stylistic knowledge acquired in reading. This study mainly focuses on integrated reading-to-writing mode applied in teaching college English writing based on output-driven hypothesis, aiming at helping teachers guide students to improve their language proficiency so as to enhance the efficiency of writing.

This study applied the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique to explore the predictive relations among personality facets, writing strategy use, and writing performance of college students learning English as a foreign language (EFL). In total, 201 participants composed an argument-based essay, before being surveyed using two self-report instruments: the Personality Facet Scale (PFS), which measured 10 facets within the framework of the Five-Factor Model (FFM), and the Writing Strategy Scale (WSS) that assessed six types of strategy. The established structural model indicated the following: (a) Five types of strategy and six facets predicted writing performance, (b) nine facets predicted the use of at least one type of strategy, either positively or negatively, and (c) the five types of strategy mediated the relations between the nine facets and writing performance. As suggested, adding and treating strategy use as a mediator could help elaborate and elucidate the facet–performance relations in the EFL writing context.

Abstract Integrated assessment evaluates language proficiency through tasks that require the test-taker to produce a written or spoken output based on listening or reading comprehension (reading or listening-into-writing or speaking). Since integrated assessment aims at reflecting the communicative and cognitive requirements of academic life and other professions, it is considered a means of assessment that is both authentic and valid. Examples of integrated tests can be found in high-stakes examinations at universities with English as the medium of instruction, and in the standardised high-stakes examinations offered by ETS, Pearson Education and Trinity College London. This report provides an example of integrated assessment in action by describing a currently used integrated test developed at the Language Department of the Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic. Since 2018, this particular integrated test has served as the entrance examination for Biological Chemistry (EEBC), a bachelor’s degree course delivered entirely in English. By detailing the rationale behind the examination and the design process, this report aims to show that integrated assessment can provide a valid alternative to independent assessment at the tertiary level.

A good start in researching on language teaching and learning issues is to first analyse target learners’ actual performance and their needs. This mixed-methods 2-cycle study is aimed to analyse medical-college students’ language needs through two instruments—a self-rated report and a guided focus group. Out of the main four language skills (speaking, reading, listening, and writing), Cycle 1 aimed at exploring the most trouble-provoking skill for EMP students through a 7-item rating report with a sample of 45 participants. Based on the results of Cycle 1 which labelled speaking as the most problematic language skill for the target learners, Cycle 2 proceeded with 9 interviewees to narrow the study focus on the factors contributing to the inefficiency of speaking skills among EMP learners, discussing solutions from the learners’ perspectives. Pedagogically, this research helps practitioners innovate and integrate new techniques in language teaching and learning to overcome the issue of students’ speaking performance that has been deemed below expectations.

Although the termstudent-athletedoes not appear in any standard English dictionary, it is routinely used in the United States in reference to athletes who participate in secondary and post-secondary school sport programs. Popular usage of the termstudent-athletesuggests widespread agreement in the culture and among academics that it is a term with either a favorable meaning or, at the very least, a benign or neutral one. In recent years, however, scholars who have explored the evolution and etymology of the term report that its introduction into the language of sport in the United States was an NCAA tactic in the 1950s to counter negative publicity and political pressure created by its newly instituted athletic scholarship policy. The focus of this research perspective is on the history of the termstudent-athlete,the propaganda mechanism used to encourage and perpetuate acceptance of the term in the United States, and the reasons why scholars might wish to avoid its use when writing about college and high school sport.

This paper will examine the collaborative teaching process undertaken at College of the North Atlantic- Qatar (CNA-Q) by Engineering and the Communication faculties to improve the overall quality of engineering students’ capstone projects known as the Technical Thesis. The Technical Thesis is divided into two separate components: a proposal stage (Tech Thesis 1- investigative) and a technical/presentation stage (Tech Thesis 2 - final written and oral communicative report). It involves a complex blending of experimentation, technical information and data with competent formal technical report writing skills. In an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) environment, this challenge is formidable for students as it involves high technical as well as linguistic competencies. In an effort to gain accreditation from the Canadian Technology Accreditation Board (CTAB), a standing committee of The Canadian Council of Technicians and Technologists (CCTT) which provides national accreditation for over 240 post-secondary engineering technology and applied technology programs in Canada, the School of Engineering realized student results on the Technical Thesis at CNA-Q needed marked improvement. A pilot project, started during the 2008- 2009 academic year, brought engineering faculty from various fields (Chemical Processing, Electrical, Mechanical, Process Automation and Telecommunications) together with writing faculty from the Communications Department to take on the task of improving final Tech Thesis results through co-delivery. Specifically, this paper will examine: the process of developing the collaborative teaching approach at CNA-Q; its perceived value by the stakeholders (faculty and students); the ongoing challenges associated with its delivery; and the overall level of improvement in student performance on the Technical Thesis as a result of the collaboration.

Language makes human communication possible. Apart from everyday applications, language can provide insights into individuals’ thinking and reasoning. Machine-based analyses of text are becoming widespread in business applications, but their utility in learning contexts are a neglected area of research. Therefore, the goal of the present work is to explore machine-assisted approaches to aid in the analysis of students’ written compositions. A method for extracting common topics from written text is applied to 78 student papers on technology and ethics. The primary tool for analysis is the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm. The results suggest that this machine-based topic extraction method is effective and supports a promising prospect for enhancing classroom learning and instruction. The method may also prove beneficial in other applied applications, like those in clinical and counseling practice.
 References
 
 Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research 3, 993-1022.
 Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
 Chen, K. Y. M., & Wang, Y. (2007). Latent dirichlet allocation. http://acsweb.ucsd.edu/~yuw176/ report/lda.pdf.
 Chung, C. K., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2008). Revealing dimensions of thinking in open-ended self-descriptions: An automated meaning extraction method for natural language. Journal of research in personality, 42(1), 96-132.
 Feldman, S. (1999). NLP meets the Jabberwocky: Natural language processing in information retrieval. Online Magazine, 23, 62-73. Retrieved from: http://www.onlinemag.net/OL1999/ feldmann5.html
 Mishlove, J. (2010). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XTDLq34M18 (Accessed June 12, 2018).
 Ostrowski, D. A. (2015). Using latent dirichlet allocation for topic modelling in twitter. In Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2015 IEEE International Conference (pp. 493-497). IEEE.
 Pennebaker, J. W. (2004). Theories, therapies, and taxpayers: On the complexities of the expressive writing paradigm. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11(2), 138-142.
 Pennebaker, J.W., Boyd, R.L., Jordan, K., & Blackburn, K. (2015). The development and psychometric properties of LIWC 2015. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin.
 Pennebaker, J. W., Chung, C. K., Frazee, J., Lavergne, G. M., & Beaver, D. I. (2014). When small words foretell academic success: The case of college admissions essays. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e115844.
 Pennebaker, J. W., & King, L. A. (1999). Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1296-1312.
 Recchia, G., Sahlgren, M., Kanerva, P., & Jones, M. N. (2015). Encoding sequential information in semantic space models: Comparing holographic reduced representation and random permutation. Computational intelligence and neuroscience, 2015, 1-18.
 Salzmann, Z. (2004). Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (3rd ed). Westview Press.
 Schank, R. C., Goldman, N. M., Rieger III, C. J., & Riesbeck, C. (1973). MARGIE: Memory analysis response generation, and inference on English. In IJCAI, 3, 255-261.
 Taraban, R., Marcy, W. M., LaCour Jr., M. S., & Burgess II, R. A. (2017). Developing machine-assisted analysis of engineering students’ ethics course assignments. Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, Columbus, OH. https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/78/papers/19234/view.
 Taraban, R., Marcy, W. M., LaCour, M. S., Pashley, D., & Keim, K. (2018). Do engineering students learn ethics from an ethics course? Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education – Gulf Southwest (ASEE-GSW) Annual Conference, Austin, TX. http://www.aseegsw18.com/papers.html.
 Taraban, R., & Marshall, P. H. (2017). Deep learning and competition in psycholinguistic research. East European Journal of Psycholinguistics, 4(2), 67-74.
 Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 36-45.
 Winograd, T. (1972). Understanding natural language. New York: Academic Press.