Effects of rhetorical text analysis on idea generation and text quality
Producing a meaningful written discourse in a foreign language requires a high cognitive effort of EFL learners.
They face challenges caused by L2 word or grammar-related difficulties, and also by the L2 genre and genre conventions that may be
quite different from what they experienced in their L1. The present study focusses on the support offered to Vietnamese L2 writers
to overcome these hindrances. An intensive four-week writing intervention was designed and tested to examine whether encouraging
genre awareness via a short session of sample text analysis could empower students to conduct effective brainstorming for
argumentative writing. In a pre-test post-test control group design with switching replications, with 66 EFL intermediate
undergraduate participants, the study obtained four indicators of L2 argumentative writing quality: idea generation, productivity,
global text quality and self-efficacy. The results showed that participants integrated the sample text analysis into the idea
generation stage. They created significantly longer self-expressive free writing texts, perceived the generated ideas as more
useful, and used more of these ideas in their argumentative texts composition, compared to students from the control condition
(with teacher instruction only). No treatment effects were found for productivity, global quality of final text, and
self-efficacy. Students in both control and treatment conditions generally showed a significant improvement on these
variables.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Genre pedagogy, idea generation practice and research in an EFL setting
- Free writing as an idea generation activity in the EFL classroom
- Method
- Participants
- Intervention
- Measures
- Procedure
- Analyses
- Results
- Generation of ideas
- Productivity and quality of final text
- Self-efficacy
- Discussion and conclusion
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Nguyen, Phuong Nam T. & Gert Rijlaarsdam
2023.
Focused Freewriting, Tchart, or Group Debate: Effects of Prewriting Conditions on EFL Argumentative Writing.
English Teaching & Learning ![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
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