University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The effect of an ESL Writing Workstation on ESL students' writing

Hassan, Rosli Hj

This item is only available for download by members of the University of Illinois community. Students, faculty, and staff at the U of I may log in with your NetID and password to view the item. If you are trying to access an Illinois-restricted dissertation or thesis, you can request a copy through your library's Inter-Library Loan office or purchase a copy directly from ProQuest.

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/22595

Description

Title
The effect of an ESL Writing Workstation on ESL students' writing
Author(s)
Hassan, Rosli Hj
Issue Date
1995
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Davidson, Frederick G.
Department of Study
Education
Discipline
Education
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Education, Language and Literature
  • Language, General
  • Education, Technology of
Language
eng
Abstract
  • Word processing software (WP) has been widely acknowledged by scholars as a very useful tool to writers. In the context of computer assisted instruction and ESL writing, this study investigated the effect of an ESL writing workstation (a WP with features that could be of help to ESL writers, and aim at developing effective writing process), on ESL students' writing.
  • "Students from the Advanced and high Intermediate levels of the Intensive English Institute (IEI) of the Division of English as an International Language (DEIL) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were asked to write an essay using the software ESL Writing WorkStation v1.2 (WWS v1.2), a WP designed with features described earlier. The essay was scored by an independent holistic rating system--the Test of Written English scale (used by permission). The general findings were: (a) Time was not a significant factor in determining student's writing quality. (b) ESL students did not spend a lot of time on prewriting activities such as brainstorming and outlining. (c) On-line ""Guided"" prewriting activity had a positive relationship with the quality of student's writing. (d) The WWS environment did encourage students to write multiple drafts for their writing. (e) Recursiveness in student's writing proved to be a significant factor in determining student's writing quality. (f) Revising earlier paragraphs only when the whole essay was ""finished"" seemed to be a significant factor in determining essay quality. (g) Students did pay attention to on-line teacher's comments on their essays. (h) Linguistic competence was not a predictive factor of student's writing quality. (i) Monitoring of what constitutes an essay had a negative relationship to the quality of student's essay."
  • Future studies could be done by involving more subjects from different levels of language proficiency, and different settings of language learning situations (other than the ESL context), by utilizing analytical measurement of quality (as opposed to holistic scoring), and by making the teacher a more active participant in the study.
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/22595
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 1995 Hassan, Rosli Hj

Owning Collections

Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois
Dissertations and Theses - Education
Dissertations and Theses from the College of Education