使用線上學術英文教材對研究生寫作之研究: 以應用語言學門論文之前言為例

Effects of Online Academic English Materials on Graduate Students' Writing: Introductions in Research Articles of the Applied Linguistic Disciplines

蔡咏秋(Yung-Chru Tsai)

指導教授 ： 劉顯親

國立清華大學/人文社會學院/外國語文學系/碩士(2006年)

https://doi.org/10.6843/NTHU.2006.00030

摘要

有鑒於期刊論文前言獨特的文類特性，前言在學術研究領域已被篇章分析學者廣泛地研究與探討。然而將其篇章分析的結果與實際教學做連結尚嫌不足，因此，本研究旨在將學術期刊前言語料庫分析之結果發展成線上教材內容，並探討一項英文線上論文寫作教材對學生的前言寫作之教學成效。
我們收集了60篇應用語言學學術期刊前言進行言步分析，藉由
電腦程式的協助，我們也進行了語料分析。語料分析的內容包括常見的搭配詞組和常使用的報告動詞。藉由人工分析的方式以提高語料分析結果的正確性進而研發線上平台之教材內容。教材內容主要包括前言架構及言步之介紹、前言常用的搭配詞組之介紹，此外，我們將一線上同儕寫作與編輯平台(POWER)和一學術英文語料庫查詢程(CARE)併入教學活動設計，以期提高教學的成效。6位英語教學碩士班之研究生參與教材成效之評量。我們收集了學生教學前和教學後所寫的前言進行評量和文本分析。分析內容主要包括文章之言步架構、話語標記語之使用及引證寫作方式。此外，學生填寫一份問卷以協助了解學生對教材內容設計的觀感。
結果顯示學生之前言寫作技巧有明顯的進步，其中以言步架
構和話語標記語為最顯著。學生不但在教學後使用了必要的言步單位，並且在文中運用了多樣的話語標記語。而在文字的使用上，我們發現學生所使用的話語標記語，相較於教學前所寫的前言更貼近學術寫作的風格。然而，學生在引證寫作技巧上並沒有明顯的增進。問卷的結果顯示學生對於線上教材的設計持有相當正面的評價，除了指出言步單元的教學寫作有十足的幫助外，也表示當需要的時候將會再度造訪此線上教學平台。除此之外，學生表示語料索引查詢對言步單位的學習有幫助。
研究結果顯示，本實驗之線上教學不但能提升學生前言文類的寫作技巧能力，而且也展示了連接文本分析語教材研發的可能性。本文對學術寫作教學提供兩點具體的建議。我們建議以學術教學為目的的課程，在教學內容的設計上能依據語料分析的結果做延伸。在教學上，我們鼓勵學生利用線上索引工具來做學習，藉由觀察語料發掘文類的微妙語言運用。最後本實驗提出了未來研究的發展方向，包括應包含更多的受試者和對照組，並且擴充語料的數量以利更精準的分析。

關鍵字

學術英文寫作 ； 前言 ； 應用語文學門

並列摘要

The genre of research article introductions has been a long-term interest of text analysts in the academic research setting (e.g., Swales, 1990). Most of the past studies, however, put emphasis on analysis, while few have applied the results to instructional material development. The present study aimed to examine the effects of online instruction on the research article introductions by linking the results of text analyses of an introduction corpus with pedagogical practice.
A corpus of 60 article introductions in the applied linguistics discipline was compiled for move analysis and corpus analysis. The move analysis was conducted with codes tagged manually to the texts in the corpus, while corpus analysis of important register features including lexical bundles, collocations, and reporting verbs was conducted semi-automatically. The instructional materials were constructed based on the analyzed results. An online peer editing platform (POWER) and a concordancer (CARE) with authentic examples from the academic corpus were added to enhance the course delivery. Six graduate students in the English teaching field were involved in the assessment phase of the project. Students’ writing samples collected before and after the instructional period were collected for rating and text analysis. The major concerns in assessment and text analysis were move structures, linguistic feature of metadiscourse markers, and the source writing. In addition, learners’ perceptions toward the usefulness of the online instruction, including the design of instructional materials, overall design, and the learning tools used, were elicited from an evaluation questionnaire.
The results of the evaluation and text analysis showed that the academic writing skill of the learners for introduction writing improved from the pre-course to the post-course stage. The move organization of students’ writing was improved with an increased use of obligatory moves, the metadiscourse markers were more productive in terms of the types of items in use, and the choice of words seemed to be more attuned to the style of academic writing. Source writing was considered the dimension with least progress in that the surface forms and the evaluative functions of citations used by the learners were discrepant from the norms of the experienced writers (Hyland, 2000). The results of the evaluation questionnaire pointed out that learners generally hold a positive attitude toward the online course instruction. Among the online materials developed, the learners indicated the instruction on move structures was most useful to their writing, and that they were willing to revisit the online learning materials for guidance in the future. Further, the experience of concordancing learning was beneficial to their learning of moves in terms of their functional usages and linguistic realizations.
The results of the present study not only showed that the online instruction on the introduction of RA genre could foster learners’ skills of academic writing, but also demonstrated the possible link between corpus analysis and pedagogical practice. It is suggested that course designers given for academic purposes could conduct corpus analysis with texts of the target genre for the development of instructional materials; in practice, we encourage students to explore the nature of the target genre with concordancing learning. With regard to the directions for future research, it is suggested that an inclusion of more subjects with a control group, and a larger sample size of corpus data is needed for more rigorous analyses.

並列關鍵字

Academic English writing ； Research article introduction ； Applied linguistics

參考文獻

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