Effects of teacher-led collaborative modeling on Chinese EFL learners’ writing development / Li Yang

Li , Yang (2023) Effects of teacher-led collaborative modeling on Chinese EFL learners’ writing development / Li Yang. PhD thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

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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