使用寫作會談對增進高中生英文作文連貫性成效之探討

The Effectiveness of Writing Conferences in Improving Coherence in High School Students’ Composition

賴惠玲(Hui-Ling Lai)

指導教授 ： 蔣湧濤

元智大學/人文社會學院/應用外語學系/碩士(2006年)

https://doi.org/10.6838/YZU.2006.00012

摘要

本論文探討使用寫作會談對增進高中生英文作文連貫性之成效，並且探究學生英文整體寫作能力是否會對寫作會談的成效有所影響。研究對象是台北縣某私立中學兩班英文寫作能力相當的高三學生共92人，一班為實驗組接受與教師的寫作會談，另一班則為對照組，接受教師傳統書面回饋。在八週的實驗裡，學生共被要求寫出四篇至少120個字的描述文，第一篇作為前測，最後一篇則為後測。前三篇的初稿，由施測者針對連貫性分別給予兩組不同方式的回饋。學生在會談之後，必須修改其初稿，並在所有文章完成後，填寫一份問卷，回答對本研究感想之相關問題。所有的初稿及經修改的文章，交由兩位評分者根據一份改編自Bamberg(1984)的評分表，針對連貫性進行評分。為了解學生英文整體寫作能力對寫作會談及傳統書面回饋成效的影響，依前測整體作文表現之結果將兩組各前三分之一的學生視為高分組，後三分之一視為低分組進行分析。
本研究結果顯示：(一)整體而言，在連貫性方面，寫作會談對於學生接受回饋後的修改成果及後測表現較傳統書面回饋有幫助。（二）寫作會談分別對於高分組及低分組的學生在連貫性方面較傳統書面回饋有幫助，不論是在接受回饋後的修改成果及後測表現上。尤其在後測表現上兩組高分組間進步幅度的差距較兩組低分組的差距顯著。（三）問卷調查結果顯示出，學生從兩種回饋方式中獲得不同的後設認知及情感協助。（四）後測結果顯示實驗組與對照組學生尤其在文章開頭、結尾及句子連貫轉折等有助達成連貫性的條件方面，較無顯著進步，對照組的進步更不明顯。
根據以上結果，本研究建議高中英文作文老師，多採取寫作會談的方式，訓練學生評論自己文章的優缺，並根據學生整體英文寫作能力，決定實施寫作會談的時機與份量，藉以改善學生在英文寫作上不連貫的問題。

關鍵字

寫作會談 ； 連貫性 ； 英文作文

並列摘要

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the teacher- student writing conference in improving coherence in high school students’ composition and to explore whether any effect would be observed related to student’s proficiency in writing. The subjects were 92 third-graders from two classes of approximately equivalent writing proficiency in a private senior high school in Taipei County. One class was designated as the experimental group, which got teacher feedback via writing conferences and the other as the control group, which received teacher feedback in the form of written commentary. The students were asked to write on four descriptive topics, with the first topic being the pretest and the last topic as the posttest. The first drafts of the first three topics were materials that the instructor responded to and then the students had to revise at home afterwards. A total of seven writing tasks were evaluated by two raters based on a coherence rating scale adapted from Bamberg (1984). After the treatment and the posttest, in order to survey the students’ attitudes toward their respective treatment, they were asked to respond to a questionnaire at the conclusion of the treatment period. To examine the short-term and long-term effectiveness of writing conference and written feedback, the intra-group improvement in the first task of revision and in the posttest writing was analyzed by paired t-test. Then, the difference between the two groups in the degree of their improvement was analyzed by two-sample t-test. To explore the effectiveness in using writing conferences for students at different levels of writing proficiency, all the statistical procedures were run again after the top one third and the bottom one third of the students in each group were grouped as higher and lower writing-achievers respectively according to their holistic performance in the pretest writing task.
Several conclusions could be drawn based on the analysis of the results. First, overall the writing conference proved more effective in helping students make progress in their revised papers as well as in the posttest writing task. Second, the writing conference was beneficial for both the students of higher and lower writing proficiency in terms of immediate revisions and the posttest. In contrast, however, the effectiveness of the written feedback seemed to be contingent, to some degree, on the students’ proficiency in writing. After treatment, a greater difference in the students’ improvement in terms of coherence in writing was observed among the higher writing-achievers in the two groups than among lower writing-achievers. Third, the responses from the questionnaire showed that the difference in the degree of effectiveness between written feedback and writing conferences was very likely the consequence of different cognitive, metacognitve and affective assistance that they provided for the students. Finally, it was discovered that some analytical features of coherence, such as introduction, conclusion, and sentence connection / transition, may be difficult for high school students to master exclusively through the aid of writing conferences, and even more so with the aid of written feedback. Based on the above findings, this study suggests using writing conference as a useful alternative to the common method of written feedback, especially when teachers want to deal with writing problems beyond the sentence level. Some suggestions are also provided for teachers of English composition as to how to implement writing conferences into their courses.

並列關鍵字

writing conference ； coherence ； English composition

參考文獻

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