Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Bibliography: leaves 131-133. / Ph.D.

This post-use evaluation research aims to investigate the appropriacy of academic writing materials to contextual needs, and to investigate the essential considerations concerning these materials. This case study was conducted with the participation of program designers, teachers, and students at three universities in Hungary, Turkey, and Oman. A unique checklist was developed to evaluate the materials. The data collection process consisted of questionnaires and interviews. The results concur with findings in the literature regarding the benefits of using computer-mediated communication in the writing class, the need to combine process and product pedagogies, the necessity of having discipline-specific themes, and the need to provide students with more guidelines and input. Interestingly, contrary to the literature, the students do not seem to benefit from peer feedback / they value teacher feedback more. Furthermore, despite their increasing role in writing, there are few collaborative writing activities in these materials. The quantitative and the qualitative data also demonstrate that the program designers and the teachers consider in-house writing materials more appropriate than global materials, since they were developed in view of the learning context and the specific requirements. However, neither global nor in-house materials are regarded as motivating and attracting for the students. There are relatively new areas for further research as a result of these findings: the role of free writing in EAP and the ways to manage mixed language levels of the students. All these findings are expected to provide insights to researchers and practitioners in the fields of writing and materials evaluation.

This post-use evaluation research aims to investigate the appropriacy of academic writing materials to contextual needs, and to investigate the essential considerations concerning these materials. This case study was conducted with the participation of program designers, teachers, and students at three universities in Hungary, Turkey, and Oman. A unique checklist was developed to evaluate the materials. The data collection process consisted of questionnaires and interviews. The results concur with findings in the literature regarding the benefits of using computer-mediated communication in the writing class, the need to combine process and product pedagogies, the necessity of having discipline-specific themes, and the need to provide students with more guidelines and input. Interestingly, contrary to the literature, the students do not seem to benefit from peer feedback / they value teacher feedback more. Furthermore, despite their increasing role in writing, there are few collaborative writing activities in these materials. The quantitative and the qualitative data also demonstrate that the program designers and the teachers consider in-house writing materials more appropriate than global materials, since they were developed in view of the learning context and the specific requirements. However, neither global nor in-house materials are regarded as motivating and attracting for the students. There are relatively new areas for further research as a result of these findings: the role of free writing in EAP and the ways to manage mixed language levels of the students. All these findings are expected to provide insights to researchers and practitioners in the fields of writing and materials evaluation.

This study investigates the types, frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters employed in L1 and L2 argumentative paragraphs written by Turkish learners of English with pre-intermediate level of proficiency. It aims to uncover whether or not Turkish learners of English writing in L1 and L2 display any transfer in their employment of hedges and boosters. The extent to which the academic writing teaching materials result in any measurable change in the employment of hedges and boosters is also pursued. To this end, the data that is comprised of 104 (52 Turkish and 52 English) argumentative paragraphs written as a response to a TOEFL essay prompt are collected. The analysis of the data is done manually and each paragraph is coded and formatted in CLAN CHILDES. Later, PASW is used to run the descriptive statistics and calculate the frequency and percentages of hedges and boosters. The results show that the types, frequencies, and meanings of hedges and boosters are culture and language-specific and they are topic and genre dependent. Research v findings also reveal that the participants in this study often express appropriate degree of certainty and pragmatic vagueness while writing in L1 and L2. However, there are some cases in which the evidence of rhetorical transfer are observed with respect to functions of certain hedges. The findings further indicate that there is a parallelism between the teaching materials used in academic writing classes and the types, frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters produced in L2 paragraphs.

The state of writing abilities throughout the United States presents an urgent issue. Low student achievement in English Language Arts (ELA) exams and standardized English assessments persist (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012), while businesses spend billions of dollars on remedial writing instruction (Dillon, 2008). Technology is increasingly cited as a potential solution to these issues. Evidence for this is limited, as is existing research into the basis of the issues that technology might address. On account of that context, this thesis turns to a basic distinction between digital and non-digital writing: the writing surface and implement, or pen and paper - screen and keyboard. Conceptualizing such artefacts through a view of writing as a way of thinking raises the following question, which is this study's guiding inquiry. Might we use digital implements and surfaces to support the ways of thinking involved in composing written works of semantic cohesion? Building on research into writing as thinking, the study presented in this document analyses how uses of writing surfaces and implements relate to ways of thinking while writing, and which contextual factors influence those relationships. Drawing on a neuro-anthropological approach, the study focuses on the writer's mind as the driver and source of the lived experience of writing. Expert writers, therefore, are considered to be those who exhibit the ways of thinking while writing to which other writers aspire. To examine a range of uses of writing surfaces and implements with reference to expert writers' ways of thinking, the study was conducted in two parts. Part 1involved a content analysis of published interviews with professional writers. This generated a framework through which to conduct in-depth qualitative research with college student writers - part 2. This thesis is as much about thinking while writing as it is about the different tools available for writing. As such, the study refutes the hyperbolic and deterministic claims about technology and writing, and finds that technology is not leading to new ways of thinking while writing. Instead, surfaces and implements available allow writers to change how they practise their ways of thinking while writing. By considering this distinction and developing understandings of the dynamics involved and their implications, writers may begin to realize the potential of technology for writing. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to existing theories on writing through an informed discussion of how to think about implements and surfaces in ways that support writerly thinking, and by offering fresh ways to think about the lived practice of writing.

The cultural accomplishments of the Northern Song dynasty are unrivalled in Chinese history. Song literati were particularly enthusiastic about calligraphy and writing materials, and the scale of their engagement in the art of writing exceeded that of both former and later dynasties, leaving plentiful legacies of calligraphic culture for later generations to study and appreciate. However, most modern studies emphasize the transmission of calligraphic culture from the Tang to Song and neglect the dynamics of disconnection and transformation between these two dynasties. By demonstrating how the technologies of brush, paper, ink cake, ink stone, and chair and desk (the "materiality" of calligraphy) shaped the look of calligraphy, this dissertation proposes an alternative understanding of the nature of Song innovations in the art of writing. Insofar as these innovations reconfigured the subsequent history of Sinitic calligraphy (calligraphic traditions based on Chinese characters), this dissertation argues that we cannot understand the art of writing without exploring the technology of writing. Through this study, I present the processes by which the literati of Northern Song traced, received, and modified the calligraphic culture of the past in creating their own Northern Song culture. Because of cultural discontinuity and transformation, what they ultimately reconstructed served as the foundation for their own culture, and has become the basis for how we think of the pre-Song past.

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The advent of the microcomputer has provided the severely handicapped with the means to create text. Instead of using a keyboard, the disabled typist is able to scan and select linguistic items with an appropriate input switch. The resulting communication rate is, however, prohibitively slow for writing and impractical for conversation. A variety of techniques is used to improve this rate and range from static letter matrices to more sophisticated methods in which words and phrases are anticipated. Although many anticipatory methods claim to be linguistically based, most, if not all, depend solely on letter and word frequency statistics. A series of phonological rules can be used to anticipate the letter structure of most English words. This linguistically based system reflects a degree of "intelligence" not present in other anticipatory writing systems. To evaluate and compare the new system with several existing techniques in practice, a programmable evaluation system has been developed on an IBM-compatible personal computer using the Artificial Intelligence language, LISP. Different communication strategies are transcribed into rulebases which serve as input to the software. The core program then executes the particular system under consideration. Input text can be processed in either manual or simulation mode and an evaluation report is generated when the session ends. The characteristics of efficient communication systems are introduced as a basis for this dissertation, after which the development and application of a linguistic anticipatory writing system is described. The design of the evaluation software is documented and the successful implementation of the various communication systems is discussed.