published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The present study is to evaluate the effects of Paired Writing on both tutors’ (high-ability Paired Writers’) and tutees’ (low-ability Paired Writers’) writing performance and motivation to write, in terms of self-efficacy and intrinsic interest, while controlling for the instructional procedures and teachers’ effect. Participants were 143 secondary one students of a local secondary school. The results showed that Paired Writers outperformed the individual writers after the intervention and made significant improvement in grammar. Regarding the effects on tutors and tutees, tutors performed significantly better than high-ability individual writers, especially in relevancy & clarity and creativity; whereas tutees made significant improvement in grammar only. Additionally, tutors had significant gain in self-efficacy following the intervention in comparison with high-ability individual writers. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

This thesis is aimed at analyzing dyslexic students’ features of written texts in Hong Kong using systemic functional linguistics. Text analytic method was adopted in comparing the texts written by dyslexic students with those written by normal students based on the systems of transitivity, theme, mood and modality. The study has further developed the concept of word density within the framework of systemic functional linguistics, putting forward the proposition of using “functional word density”, i.e. transitivity density, theme density and mood density, to analyze the language features of students with dyslexia, in the hope of shedding some light on teaching writing skills to these students. Research findings indicate that dyslexic students generally display strong capabilities in presenting specific concepts while their emotional concepts, however, are relatively weak. These students’ density of lexicon regarding material, behavioral and existential processes is higher than that of normal students but their word density of psychological and relationship processes is comparatively lower. When writing descriptive essays, narrative essays and argumentative essays, dyslexic students’ lexical density of psychological process indicates less variation than normal students. This shows that students with dyslexia are generally less flexible in expressing emotions and always fail to adapt to different genres by adjusting remarkably their use of psychological words. As a matter of fact, dyslexic students tend to be insufficient in expressing emotions. When it comes to essay writing, this “low-level of emotionality” reduces their lexical density of psychological words which will in turn undermines students’ performance in descriptive essays. Nevertheless, when doing narrative or commentary writing, these students’ proven word density is somewhat higher than that of normal students. The findings may pave the way for further research on alternative approaches in teaching writing skills to the students. It is also noteworthy that dyslexic students display similar tendency to normal students in terms of theme, mood and modality density. However, these students are good at using conjunctions while weak in connectives and modal adjunct. From the perspective of education, remedial and alternative approaches may be considered for the sake of dyslexic students. It is proposed that these students, in order to compensate for their lack of emotional lexicon, may express feelings by narrating daily occurrences and teachers may support by providing them with lexicon of relevant genres to strengthen their data bank on emotional lexicon. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

According to the statistics of the Education Bureau, 6248 junior secondary students had been identified with special learning difficulties in 2014. The incidence rate of this group of students suffering from dyslexia is about 80%. This dissertation explores and investigates the Chinese writing difficulties of the junior secondary students with dyslexia encountered from the perspectives of teachers and students. The research consists of two studies. Study1 aims atinvestigating the language teachers’ perceptions of the difficulties of dyslexia students in Chinese writing, teachers’ strategies of helping them, and their related professional training. By using a tailor-designed survey, a profound understanding about the teaching measures applied on dyslexic students can be reached. Throughout the study, 106teachers (with 40 Primary 4-6 teachers and 66 junior secondary teachers) were invited to fill in the questionnaires. The study showed that only about 30% of the respondents were trained to teach the students with dyslexia. Other respondents gave advice to students upon their own judgments, which failed to tackle the difficulties comprehensively. The respondents also stated the writing problems of dyslexic students which include inadequate words, misuse of vocabularies, poor grammatical sentences, and problems in orthographical encoding process. Teachers could mainly use brainstorming and mind-mapping to help students solving their writing problems. Case studies were conducted in Study 2 for 3 students (Grade 7, 8, 9) with dyslexia (aged13, 14 and 15respectively), who were diagnosed by educational psychologists. This study used the framework of Process-writing to analyse the processes of dyslexia students in writing their composition. By employing the Chinese Writing Scale, “Think Aloud” protocol and interview, the stages of pre-writing, writing and reviewing of the dyslexia students were disclosed while they were composing their writing and investigated the difficulties they were confronted with. The finding showed that dyslexic students were in lack of planning strategy in their pre-writing stage. Thus, students experienced “Pause” and “Edit” processes mainly due to slow decoding of the Chinese characters. As dyslexic students rarely reviewed their products, they faced the problems of lacking cognitive strategy and serious problems in orthographical encoding process. In addition, with their poor ability to put oral language into written form, dyslexic students often missed and failed to present the ideas in full. The groundbreaking aspect of this study is that this thesis is the first to employ the process-writing model, think-aloud protocol and students interview as the framework for qualitative analysis of the Chinese writing difficulties confronted by dyslexic students in Hong Kong. Through this comprehensive framework, the new processes in the Chinese writing and their difficulties were identified which will shed light on the analysis of the difficulties of dyslexia students in future research in Chinese writing or bilingual writing. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

The University of Arizona Composition Program has demonstrated that computers can be integrated successfully into composition instruction. Administrators and instructors are preparing to offer students in second-semester Freshman Composition (English 102) a computer-integrated course of instruction as the equipment and facilities become available. Chapter I relates how current research shows that computers offer support to current theories in composition and that they can be utilized in all the various processes involved with producing university writing. It explores the problems program directors and university administrators face in providing computer technology to undergraduates in writing courses. Chapter II compares the reactions of Southern Arizona Writing Project teacher-participants with freshman students in a pilot section of English 102 at the University of Arizona and with comparable undergraduates at other universities as they learn to use word processors as a tool for writing. Some differences between the older SAWP participants and the undergraduates were observed, especially a greater computer anxiety and a greater of urgency to learn about computers. The SAWP participants had less time to become proficient computer writers than did the freshmen. All these factors probably contributed to their lower success rate as computer writers. Nevertheless, a large majority of all ages of computer writers recognize the benefits of using word processors for writing and even those SAWP participants who made only limited progress expressed a sense of satisfaction at having mastered the machine. Chapter III describes ways that computer writing and strategies of collaborative learning and peer review were adapted to the syllabus of English 102 in a pilot class at the University of Arizona. Students reacted favorably to both computers and to the teaching strategies. However, the vision of total computer integration resulting in a paper-free writing course cannot be achieved without either restructuring the syllabus or acquiring substantially improved computer facilities, especially through networked workstations and computerized classrooms.

Using a transactional model of reading and writing, the dissertation discusses rhetorical aspects of the experience and representation of the American desert. The dissertations extends recent nonfiction scholarship that claims nature writing as literature by focusing on seven major nonfiction works: Some Strange Corners of Our Country (1891), by Charles F. Lummis; The Desert (1901), by John C. Van Dyke; The Land of Little Rain (1903), by Mary Austin; The Desert Year (1952), by Joseph Wood Krutch; Desert Solitaire (1968), by Edward Abbey; Desert Notes (1976), by Barry Lopez; and Secrets from the Center of the World (1990), by Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom. The Desert, by John C. Van Dyke, is treated in depth, in terms of its use of aesthetic experience to argue for conservation and for a particular philosophy of nature. Van Dyke's establishes his rhetorical stance (including the creation of the narrator and appeals he makes to particular audiences) and initiates his aesthetic and scientific delineation of the subject in the preface to the book, which is studied in detail.

The purpose set for this study was to define tentative standards of achievement through the analysis of compositions written by fifth, eighth, and eleventh-grade students in terms of quantity and quality.

This research study was designed to investigate whether authentic assessment in written language is a valid assessment tool for students with and without learning disabilities. Teacher judgements were used to evaluate students' authentic writing assessments gathered from the classroom. Students' report card grades, authentic writing assessments, and two standardized writing assessments, the Test of Written Language- Revised and Written Language Assessment, were correlated to provide evidence of the validity of authentic assessment practices in written language.

The purpose of this study was to determine reliability estimates of authentic assessment for fourth-grade narrative and descriptive writing samples for students with and without learning disabilities. Three types of reliability estimates were established: (a) inter-rater, (b) score stability, and (c) alternate-form. The research design involved 40 teachers, trained in holistic scoring by Education Service Centers 10 and 11 in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, who scored 16 writing samples. Approximately 2 weeks later the teachers rescored 8 of the same writing samples. In addition to scoring the writing samples, the teachers also completed a demographic questionnaire. The writing samples, which consisted of eight narrative and eight descriptive writings, were selected based upon teachers' holistic scores and scores from 1993 writing sample of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. Based upon these scores, two narrative and descriptive writings of above-average, average, and below-average writings were selected. In addition, two narrative and descriptive writing samples of students with learning disabilities in written language were selected.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters In Applied Language and Literacy Education November 2016 / The research topic for this study is, An investigation into summary writing and stimulated-recall of College ESL students using a socio-cultural approach in a South African context. The main research questions that were formulated to guide and frame this study were as follows; 1) What meta-cognitive reflections, students learning English as a second language with an African background engage in to deduce main ideas from a source text? 2) How is comprehension of a source text reflected in written summaries of these students? Two other sub-questions were framed for this study and these were; 1) What do students’ responses show about the strategies they use in summary writing? 2) How do African rhetoric systems affect the formation of sentences in summary writing? Theoretical frameworks that informed this study were; translanguaging which is a socio-cultural approach to language teaching in a multilingual setting and the theory of Literacy as a social practice. These two formed the core elements of this study to help address questions raised for the study. In order to address these questions, four participants were purposively sampled. These participants were all registered for a three-year diploma course at a university in Gauteng which could not be named for ethical reasons. The participants were also registered for a compulsory course; Applied Communication skills, which was meant to inculcate in them workplace related communication skills. As part of the course, they were tasked with writing summaries for reports. This task revealed below standards writing skills, which justifies the need to teach summary writing owing to the students’ writing skills which were below expected standards. The participants were selected according to their indigenous South African languages which were grouped under Nguni, Sotho, Venda and Tsonga. The methods that were used to collect data in this study were drawn from Ethnographic studies but this does not mean that this study was ethnographic. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted individually, ten minutes after writing the summaries. Secondly, document analysis was undertaken where participants wrote two summaries translingually. The first summary was written in English whilst the other was written in their first languages. The reason for the summaries being written translingually was to check for understanding of the source text. The interviews were audio recorded after all ethical considerations were addressed, including seeking permission to record the participants. Anonymity could not be guaranteed because the interviews were done face-to-face. However, confidentiality was promised and the participants were assured that personally identifiable information would not be disclosed to unauthorised people and that raw data would be destroyed after a period of five years. In addition, pseudonyms were used on the summaries that the students wrote. Ultimately, the interviews were transcribed and coded using thematic and conceptual analysis methods. (Babbie & Mouton, 2001; Ibrahim, 2012). Emerging themes were taken note of and discussed under the study’s findings section. A discussion of the findings was done, situating them within the relevant body of literature to confirm or refute claims of previous research on the study. Conclusions of the study were drawn and recommendations made. Limitations of the study were acknowledged and implications for potential further research were suggested for this under researched area. / MT2017