M.Ed. / The teaching of writing skills applicable to the content subjects in the English second language classroom is a recent concern. The concern is raised by the emphasis which the communicative approach places on the integration of skills (Kilfoil and Van der Walt, 1997:263), which many teachers seem to ignore. This neglect is seen in the leaners' poor essays which they write both in the English second language classroom and in their content subjects. It should be emphasised that teaching writing skills does not only mean teaching learners how to write compositions and letters, as is usually done in the language classroom, but also implies teaching them how to write expository texts in other subjects. The focus of this research is a group of learners from historically black secondary schools in this Province who had failed matric several times and were admitted to various Colleges of Education in the Northern Province to be offered a Finishing Programme. These learners seem to be `underprepared' in as far as expository writing is concerned. Miller (1989:158) defines the concept of `underpreparedness' in educational terms as the gaps that the learners have in their knowledge which require help in filling in blank spaces. The finishing learners at the Colleges in the Province constitute a small group among thousands of matric pupils who are underprepared for matric.

The purpose of this case study was to examine what would happen when poetry writing was incorporated into a technical writing course for engineering students. To make poetry relevant to engineering students and topics of technical writing, a low-stakes assignment of poetry writing as prewriting about a technical object, called Technical Poetry, was designed and paired with a high-stakes assignment of technical description. The study explored with a group of engineering students their experiences of writing technical poetry, how they perceived it, and how it changed their technical writings and perceptions of engineering. The study did not intend to teach the engineering students to become professional poets, but to keep the focus of the study on enhancing technical writing instruction and developing students’ technical writing through a creative, poetic, and expressive pedagogy. The problem that engineering students have, of writing for and communicating through technical documents with a broad range of audiences who vary from high-technical to low-technical and lay readers, demands a broad range of exercises in different writing forms and genres. The Expressive Theory of composition emphasizes the benefits of creative and poetic writing exercises that foster writing from alternative perspectives, such as the poet’s perspective, and eventually improve the students’ writing and communication skills. Furthermore, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory informed the study of the roles metaphors play in language and mind and how they can be applied to writing technical documents and clarifying complex technical and scientific matters for readers. Poetry was used as a creative and expressive pedagogical tool that introduced poetic devices such as metaphors, similes, and analogies to equip engineering students with language techniques for effective technical communication with a broad range of audiences. The practice of writing poetry and creating metaphors also served to familiarize the engineering students with the creative thinking experience used in industrial designing, inventing, and technical problem solving, referred to as biomimicry or biomimetic. A qualitative case study was designed for in-depth case-by-case research. Data were collected from multiple sources including the students’ technical poems, technical descriptions in prose, pre- and post-poetry reflections or questionnaires, and interviews. The study adopted coding and discourse analysis methods to examine the students’ metaphors in communicating complex technical concepts with lay readers, their experiences of technical poetry writing, and their perceptions of engineering through the creative poetic pedagogy. As a result, the vast majority of the students reported positive changes in their perceptions of poetry and engineering and showed more effectiveness in their technical writings. In addition to writing technical poems that embodied metaphors, the students wrote technical descriptions that included numerous metaphors which, in turn, made their technical writings more understandable and relatable to lay readers. Recommendations are offered for ways that technical writing instructors can design and apply poetic, expressive, and creative pedagogies. Poetry was one way to make a change in the way English instructors teach technical writing to engineering students. Further studies can look at the impact of other literary and creative pedagogies.

The purpose of this study was to determine if adult students at the College of the Rockies improved in their ability to write technical English after having studied specifically developed curriculum. The research was conducted during the winter semester (January to April 1999) at the Cranbrook, BC campus. Curriculum for the course Technical and Professional Writing 091 was developed as a project for the Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology, an arm of the post-secondary education division of the government of the Province of British Columbia. Four of the units, Direct Requests, Bad News Messages, Persuasive Writing, and Reports and Proposals were tested out in the Cranbrook class via pre and posttesting of the students. As well, field observations and interviews formed an integral component of the study. The final data analysis overall improvement in the learners' ability to write technical English; in addition, each curriculum unit was scrutinized for improvement rates. Recommendations were made for further areas of study and research needed in this discipline. / ix, 81 leaves ; 29 cm.

The needs of business and industry dictate that students be taught skills transferable to the workplace. Teaching collaborative writing for real-world application to the field of technical writing is one way to help prepare students for future employment in scientific and technical industries where the communication of technical information is part of conducting daily business.

Research has demonstrated the positive effects on reading achievement measures when content is conditioned as a reinforcer for prolonged reading. While previous research has focused on conditioning narrative texts on the relation to increased comprehension, there is no current research on the effects of conditioning informational texts. Experiment 1 examined whether the effects of conditioning narrative texts as a reinforcer extends to technical writing for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) content for third graders with and without Individualized Education Plans. We replicated the conditioning procedures used with elementary-aged participants in previous studies for narratives texts. Using a four-step, peer-collaborative procedure, peer interactions were paired with reading activities to condition narrative texts as reinforcers for prolonged reading. Results indicated that reinforcement value of conditioned narrative texts did not transfer to STEM texts. Experiment 2 examined whether the effects of conditioning STEM texts as reinforcer extends to narrative texts. Academic achievement was also measured after conditioned reinforcement for STEM texts was established using the four-step peer collaborative procedure. Results indicated that the reinforcement value for STEM texts did not transfer to narrative texts. Keywords: conditioned reinforcement, narrative, pairing, peers

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of word processor use by foreign college writers and their attitudes toward writing, writing revision practices, writing quality, attitudes toward the use of computers, and time spent on computers. The results indicate that students' attitudes toward writing and their perceptions of computer usefulness significantly affected their writing quality. Students with more positive attitudes toward writing and the usefulness of computers tended to produce better quality writing. In addition, the findings indicate that students' writing revision practices significantly affected their attitudes toward writing. Students who revised their writing more frequently tended to have better attitudes toward writing than those who did not. In contrast, students' levels of computer anxiety, computer confidence, computer liking and their writing revision practices did not significantly affect the quality of their writing. Furthermore, the amount of time that students spent on computers did not significantly affect their attitudes toward using computers in writing.

This investigation is concerned with the problem of Texas employers' inability to hire adequately trained technical communication personnel because Texas universities and colleges do not offer a bachelor's degree program for that career field. This study contains the results of five separate surveys that investigate the backgrounds and training of present technical communication personnel and the training desired by supervisory personnel. The study also recommends a bachelor's degree program in technical communication with three technological specialties: electronics, mechanical, and chemical/petroleum. Anticipated problems in setting up such a degree program and possible solutions to the problems are discussed in the study. The suggested freshman and sophomore curriculum could be used as a guideline for a junior college associate program.

The area of discourse acquisition and writing in higher education has become a much researched field. In South Africa the interest in discourse acquisition and writing has been partly in response to the change in student profile, particularly over the past ten years. While South African researchers and academics are increasingly focusing their interest in discourse acquisition and writing on the unique circumstances here, they rely on theories based on research done in very different social contexts. These theories are not necessarily universally appropriate. South Africa is currently undergoing a period of transformation in higher education aimed at greater access and equity for black students and academics. The accompanying sense of frustration and disillusionment among students and academics underlines the need to reappraise all aspects of higher education. Much of the research on discourse acquisition and writing is undertaken in arts programmes: vocational fields - such as engineering education - tend to be neglected. If the envisaged growth in science and engineering education is to be realised, it is essential that research in discourse and writing be undertaken in engineering programmes. This study investigates discourse acquisition as experienced by students in a South African engineering faculty. The experiences of six final year technikon students are investigated to gain a better understanding of what it means to acquire the discourse of engineering. The phenomenological method used requires that the researcher suspends or brackets a priori theoretical notions or pre-conceptions so that that which the students experience, rather than what the researcher expects in terms of theory, can emerge. What emerges from the students' experiences is partially congruent with established discourse and writing theories. However, some of the student experiences of discourse acquisition differ in significant ways from what is described in mainstream writing and discourse acquisition theory. The differences in the manner in which these students experience their acquisition of engineering discourse leads to a new understanding of the phenomenon. The students do not experience the alienation or struggle described in mainstream theoretic accounts of discourse acquisition. Students' approaches to writing are affected by their awareness of their multiple identities and the different locations in which they learn. Their approaches to writing are significantly different in some respects from descriptions in mainstream theories in some respects. The description of their experiences gives a different understanding of what it means to acquire the discourse of engineering, and may contribute to the reappraisal of engineering education in a contemporary South African context.

Writing-to-learn strategies have been administered in the past to enrich student learning. The purpose of this study was to see if K-W-L prompts in science journal writing could benefit student content knowledge within biology. Two high school biology classes were provided with learning journals. The journals given to the students during the treatment unit were provided with K-W-L question prompts to guide student learning while during the comparison unit students were given an open ended writing assignment. Pre and posttests were administered to determine student-learning gains. Student motivations and opinions of the treatment were collected through student interviews. The combined results were used to determine to what extent could K-W-L prompts in science journal writing influence comprehension of content knowledge. This study found there to be no difference in student learning gains when utilizing the K-W-L literacy strategy versus another free-writing activity. When scored, student K-W-Ls total scores did correlate to student success on unit tests. This opens up the potential for K-W-Ls to serve as an adequate tool for formative assessment. Here the K-W-L could be expanded to enrich student question asking, potentially aid students learning English, and potentially be used by students without teacher scaffolding.

L’exprérience d’enseignement et l’examen des mémoires en français des étudiants en Agroaliemtaire ont montré que nos apprenants produisaient souvent des phrases longues et peu compréhensibles à cause des erreurs morphosyntaxiques. En conséquence, les mémoires sont peu lisibles sur le plan linguistique. <p>De plus, nous remarquons des traces de la langue vietnamienne dans la production en français des étudiants. Or, les apprenants sont obligés de consulter les articles scientifiques en vietnamien de leurs enseignants lors de la préparation du mémoire. De plus, l’étude des articles montre que les auteurs formulent aussi des phrases très longues de plusieurs informations.<p>Ainsi, toutes ces constatations nous orientent vers une analyse contrastive des phrases longues en vietnamien des scientifiques avec celles trouvées dans les mémoires en français des étudiants. <p>Selon notre revue de littérature des recherches précédentes, des auteurs prédécesseurs mesurent la lisibilité d’un texte en se basant statistiquement sur la familiarité du vocabulaire, la longueur des mots, la longueur des phrases, ou la longueur des sous-phrases. <p>Toutefois, la mesure par le comptage du nombre de mots par phrase des auteurs semble inappropriée à notre travail par la différence des objectifs. <p>Nous avons donc essayé de trouver une unité de mesure de la longueur des phrases pertinente à notre propre corpus :« informations enchâssées ».<p>Selon les auteurs prédécesseurs, une phrase sera vue comme longue si elle contient plus de trois sous-phrases. Quant à nous, les phrases seront jugées longues si elles dépassent trois informations enchâssées. <p>Après la collecte des phrases longues, nous avons utilisé l’approche qualitative pour les analyser. Après l’analyse du corpus, nous avons obtenu des résultats suivants :la production des phrases longues ainsi que la présence des erreurs morphosyntaxiques dues à l’interférence du vietnamien constituent des caractéristiques typiques des mémoires des étudiants francophones à Can Tho. Ce sont ces traits représentatifs qui ont compromis la lisibilité des phrases de nos apprenants.<p>Face aux difficultés de nos apprenants, nous essayons de trouver quelques esquisses didactiques adéquates à notre propre public.<p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished