| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系在職進修碩士班 === 98 === ABSTRACT
Blogs have been used as a convenient tool for personal interaction, knowledge management, and expression of online opinions with wide popularity in recent years, and they are increasingly being applied to education and language learning. The current study investigated the effectiveness of blog-integrated peer feedback revision on the writing performance and attitude of vocational high school students in Taiwan. The duration of the experiment lasted for approximately five months, and the participants were students of two classes in a vocational high school in Taichung City. The participants were divided into two groups: one class was the experimental group (the blog-integrated group) and the other was the control group (the traditional paper-and-pen writing group), with a total of 44 students. The experimental group (the blog-integrated group) consisted of 20 students while the control group (the traditional paper-and pen writing group) was composed of 24 students. Both groups wrote three in-class essays besides the writing pre-test and writing post-test in the 20-week composition courses. The experimental group (the blog-integrated group) wrote all the three essays, gave peer feedback, and revised their first draft on the blogs. After the revision, they handed in their second draft for teacher feedback. The third draft, revised according to teacher feedback, was scored by the teacher afterwards. However, the control group wrote essays on paper for teacher feedback. Their revised second drafts were graded by the teacher. Every participant in the present study wrote one writing pre-test and post-test. To assess students’ improvement in writing performance more objectively, the researcher adopted the grammar checker program (http://140.122.83.189:8080/ wgrammar/ default.asp ) and the Vocabprofiler system (http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/) to examine students’ text length (i.e. content length & sentence length) and lexical richness (i.e. type-token ratio and lexical density) to have a better understanding of variances in writing content and diction. Moreover, the syntactic complexity, including T-Units and T-Unit length, were also examined to gain more insight into participants’ improvement in grammar structure. With regard to their writing attitude, both groups responded to the writing attitude questionnaire simultaneously when taking the writing pre-test, and took the same questionnaire in the writing post-test. The blog-integrated group filled out another blog-evaluation questionnaire to elicit students’ perceptions and recommendations with regard to the experimental design. The analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and one sample T-test were employed in the study for data analysis.
The major findings in the current study were summarized as follows:
1. There were no significant differences in their overall writing performance between the experimental group and the traditional group. However, the experimental group made slightly more progress in terms of content length, type-token ratio, lexical density, and T-Units, although this was not statistically significant.
2. There were no significant differences in the writing attitudes between the two groups. Further comparison revealed that students in the experimental group showed greater interest and motivation, felt less anxious and had an increased realization of the usefulness of English writing.
3. The experimental group generally held a positive attitude toward writing on blogs, and blog-integrated peer feedback. The great majority of students perceived that the combination of blogs and peer feedback as beneficial to their English writing and agreed with the novelty and attraction of the design. Nevertheless, they also offered some practical suggestions. For example, the reward system or modeling of quality peer feedback and good blogs were recommended to be adopted as incentives to encourage students to devote themselves to the design. They also suggested that more rigidly structured guidelines, more intervention from teachers, and more class time in training, writing, and revision. Further, one or two members in a group may not be enough to provide diverse perspectives.
Finally, the researcher provides practical pedagogical implications and suggestions concerning blog-integrated peer feedback and English writing instruction.
|
|---|
