Exploring the interplay of mode of discourse and proficiency level in ESL writing performance

Recent theory in discourse and practice in rhetoric has suggested that writers require different skills and strategies when writing for different purposes, and in using different genres and modes (Kinneavy, 1972; Carrell and Connor, 1991) in writing. The importance of taking into account these various aspectual skills and forms of writing is recognised in teaching (e.g. Scarcella and Oxford, 1992), and in the assessment of writing (e.g. Odell and Cooper, 1980). For instance, Odell and Cooper argued that any claims about writing ability cannot be made until students’ performance on a variety of writing tasks has been examined. Thus, the issue of what writing task(s) are to be included in a test is crucial, since a task will be regarded as useless if it does not provide the basis for making generalisations regarding an individual’s writing ability. This paper presents the findings of a study on the effects of mode of discourse on L2 writing performance as well as the interplay between learner variable, namely, proficiency level and task variable, mode of discourse amongst Malaysian upper secondary ESL learners. The findings provide some evidence for the need to re-examine issues of reliability and validity in test practice of manipulating variables in the design of assessment tasks to evaluate ESL writing performance. Given the status and complexity of the writing skill, it stands to reason that studies into this area will continue to shed light onto how best the construct can be understood, taught and tested to give a fair chance for language learners to exhibit their true ability and be reliably reported on

The Elementary Persuasive Letter: Two Cases Of Situated Competence, Strategy, And Agency

Research on persuasive writing by elementary children posits primarily a developmental perspective, claiming that elementary-age children can effectively argue through talk but not through writing. While this view is commonly held, this article presents counterevidence. Drawing on two cases of third and fourth grade children writing persuasive letters gathered during six-month naturalistic studies of literacy practices and social identities in contrastive communities (one urban, one suburban), these data challenge the developmental generalization by showing that children in these settings can write persuasively. Further, this work complicates understandings of children\u27s persuasive writing by showing how assignments and local cultures shape children\u27s writing. Evidence is developed through rich description of the case study settings and instructional tasks, a typology of the children\u27s persuasive strategies, and a critical discourse analysis of the children\u27s persuasive letters. This study suggests that children in both communities are capable of persuasive writing, although they enact different patterns of response, drawing on locally learned discourses. The settings, the hybridity of the persuasive letter as both argument and letter, and the children\u27s habitus may account for some of the differences in how the children address the tasks through ranges of centeredness and agentive strategies. Differing patterns of response suggest new frames for viewing and fostering children\u27s argumentative competence in a range of settings, including understandings of agency. The author encourages a research agenda that accounts for socially situated classroom and community practices, and argues for ongoing research and critique of the power and place of persuasive writing for children in a range of schools

Friend to Develop an Argumentative Essay

Writing is a process that helps the students develop their ideas and logical thinking. Principally, to write means to try to produce a written message. Because of these facts, it is necessary for teachers and students to master it well as writing plays a very important role in many processes including teaching and learning proc-esses. However, in the real teaching and learning process, junior high students who have been accustomed to LKS (Student Worksheet) consider writing a boring activity. They have to just fill in the blanks, answer the ques-tions, and rearrange jumbled paragraphs in spite of writing their own ideas based on certain topics. This be-comes the drawbacks for them to get actively involved in writing activities. To overcome that, FRIEND standing for Fact, Reason, Point, Elaboration and Decision is considered help-ful to improve learners' ability to develop an argumentative essay. FRIEND helps learners to write well-developed and properly organized essay since it provides systematic ways to do so. Besides, FRIEND actually gives learners an easy way to think, express, and organize their ideas into a good argumentative essay. . Keywords: FRIEND, argumentative essa

A College Entrance Essay Exam Intervention for Students with Disabilities and Struggling Writers: A Randomized Control Trial

abstract: High school students with high-incidence disabilities and struggling writers face considerable challenges when taking high-stakes writing assessments designed to examine their suitability for entrance to college. I examined the effectiveness of a writing intervention for improving these students’ performance on a popular college entrance exam, the writing assessment for the ACT. Students were taught a planning and composing strategy for successfully taking this test using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model. A randomized control trial was conducted where 20 high school students were randomly assigned to a treatment (N = 10) or control (N = 10) condition. Control students received ACT math preparation. SRSD instruction statistically enhanced students’ planning, the quality of their written text (including ideas and analysis, development and support, organization, and language use), the inclusion of argumentative elements in their compositions, and the use of transition words in written text. Limitations of the study, future research, and implications for practice are discussed.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Learning, Literacies and Technologies 201

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Argumentation Element Annotation Modeling using XLNet

This study demonstrates the effectiveness of XLNet, a transformer-based language model, for annotating argumentative elements in persuasive essays. XLNet's architecture incorporates a recurrent mechanism that allows it to model long-term dependencies in lengthy texts. Fine-tuned XLNet models were applied to three datasets annotated with different schemes - a proprietary dataset using the Annotations for Revisions and Reflections on Writing (ARROW) scheme, the PERSUADE corpus, and the Argument Annotated Essays (AAE) dataset. The XLNet models achieved strong performance across all datasets, even surpassing human agreement levels in some cases. This shows XLNet capably handles diverse annotation schemes and lengthy essays. Comparisons between the model outputs on different datasets also revealed insights into the relationships between the annotation tags. Overall, XLNet's strong performance on modeling argumentative structures across diverse datasets highlights its suitability for providing automated feedback on essay organization.Comment: 28 page

The POW+TREE Strategy’s Effects on the Argumentative Writing of Struggling Secondary Students

The present study aims to evaluate the effects of an argumentative writing strategy (POW+TREE) on four struggling ninth graders’ ability to produce persuasive texts regarding their point of view on different questions. I applied a multiple-baseline design to evaluate outcomes across participants. The results indicate the intervention helped students to write more extensive essays, and evidence shows an increase in quality. Follow-up data suggest the effects remained after the treatment ended. I also discuss future research and the findings’ implications for practitioners

AN EXPERIMENT OF AUDIENCE AWARENESS EFFECTS ON COLLEGE STUDENTS’ ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING

This experimental study explored the effects of different levels (imagined audience vs. interactive audience) and timing of audience interaction (during planning vs. revision) on undergraduate students’ self-efficacy and quality of argumentative writing. A total of 138 students from four undergraduate educational psychology courses participated in this study. Three conditions were compared: imagined audience, interactive audience during planning and interactive audience during revision. Results showed that students interacting with audience during revision produced significantly more argumentative elements (below level 1 reasons of opposing view) and had higher self-efficacy for audience awareness than the other two conditions. Students’ cognitive load and audience-related strategies utilized during the writing task were also explored. Findings generally showed that audience-related strategies and distribution of cognitive resources during different stages of writing are likely to be associated with differences in writing performance. Advisor: Roger Brunin