INPUT AND UPTAKE IN HIGH SCHOOL EFL STUDENTS’ MULTIPLE-DRAFT

WRITING PROCESS: A CASE STUDY OF A TAIWANESE HIGH SCHOOL EFL

CLASSROOM

Yi-Ting Hsu

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Education,

Indiana University

August 2017




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 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University,

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Doctoral Committee

_____________________________________
Martha Nyikos, Ph.D., Chair and Director

_____________________________________
Sharon Pugh, Ph.D.

_____________________________________
Larry Mikulecky, Ph.D.

_____________________________________
Jesse Goodman, Ph.D.

July 1, 2014

ii
Copyright © 2017

Yi-Ting Hsu

iii
 Yi-Ting Hsu

INPUT AND UPTAKE IN HIGH SCHOOL EFL STUDENTS’ MULTIPLE-DRAFT

WRITING PROCESS: A CASE STUDY OF A TAIWANESE HIGH SCHOOL EFL

CLASSROOM

This study emphasized the instructional input and student uptake of high school students’

EFL writing process in Taiwan. A multiple-draft writing approach was utilized to meet students’

need for writing preparation for college admission tests, the General Scholastic Ability Test

(GSAT) and the Department Required Test (DRT). Thirty-six 10th grade students, whose English

proficiency ranged from low to intermediate, participated in this study along with their EFL

teacher. Students’ essays were assessed by two high school teachers using five criteria: content,

organization, grammar/syntax, vocabulary/spelling, and format awareness, as released by the

College Entrance Exam Center in Taiwan. Students wrote two themed essays during the

implementation of the multiple-draft approach and two timed essays; one before the

implementation of the writing approach (pre-test), and the other after completion of the thirteen

writing sessions (posttest). Paired-sample t-tests measured the difference between the pre- and

post-test. Results indicated a significant difference in one category, format awareness. A

grounded theory approach was used to analyze interview transcript data, the field notes and peer

review responses. The results indicate that students felt that the time factor had little to do with

their timed writing performance; instead, confusion regarding basic English grammar,

insufficient experience with English essay writing, the uncertainty of how to apply vocabulary

and doubts regarding meaning of vocabulary were obstacles preventing uptake in their writing

process. Students highly valued the input via personalized feedback from the teacher participant

iv
and the researcher. Though teacher-student meetings served the purpose of content development

and grammar correction, students preferred one-on-one meetings with the teacher. Students

benefitted from peer-to-peer discussions and heightened awareness during process writing but

doubted the validity of peer review feedback they had received. The teacher participant reported

struggling to step out of his teacher-centered approach while attempting to utilize the suggested

student-centered instructional approach. Pressured to keep up with the school’s strict curriculum

and with limited instructional time, he resisted offering basic grammar review based on students’

observed needs for English basics. These factors mitigated greatly the promised potential of

input and uptake in utilizing a process writing approach with EFL high school students.

_____________________________________
Martha Nyikos, Ph.D., Chair and Director

_____________________________________
Sharon Pugh, Ph.D.

_____________________________________
Larry Mikulecky, Ph.D.

_____________________________________
Jesse Goodman, Ph.D.

v
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………….……………………………………...…...vi
LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………….…….…….viii
LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………….x
CHAPTER ONE ........................................................................................................................... 1
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 1
Background and Purpose .............................................................................................................. 1
Statement of the Problem .............................................................................................................. 2
Rationale of the Study.................................................................................................................... 7
Research Questions ....................................................................................................................... 8
Significance of the Study ............................................................................................................... 9
CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................................................ 10
THE FACTORS INTERWOVEN IN WRITING ..................................................................................... 10
Facets of High-stakes Writing ................................................................................................... 10
Linguistic Accuracy under Timed Conditions ................................................................... 12
Prompt Topics in Writing Assessments ............................................................................. 16
The Issue of the Reliability of Raters and the Adaptability of Criteria ............................. 18
Oppression in Writing Assessments .................................................................................. 21
Facts of Low-Stakes Writing ...................................................................................................... 24
Writing Is a Recursive Process of Making Meaning ......................................................... 25
Teaching Grammar in Foreign Language Learning........................................................... 26
Perspectives on Peer Review and Teacher Comments ...................................................... 32
CHAPTER THREE .................................................................................................................... 38
THEORATICAL FRAMEWORK…………………………………………………......……….. 38
Concepts of Sociocultural Theory ............................................................................................... 38
Zone of Proximal Development ......................................................................................... 38
Internalization and Transformation.................................................................................... 40
Process Theory in Writing ........................................................................................................... 40
The Flowers and Hayes Model of Writing ........................................................................ 42
The Updated Hayes Model of Writing .............................................................................. 45
CHAPTER FOUR....................................................................................................................... 48
METHOD ....................................................................................................................................... 48
Setting .......................................................................................................................................... 48
Adoption of Curriculum Materials..................................................................................... 48
Implementation of the Multiple-Draft Approach in the Curriculum. ................................ 50
Teacher Participant and Researcher Participant. ............................................................... 50
Procedure for Forming Groups of Student Participants. .................................................... 52
Student Participants in General Groups (Groups 1, 2, 3, and 5). ....................................... 53
Student Participants in the Focal Group. ........................................................................... 54
Student Participants’ Schedules at HD High school. ......................................................... 54

vi
 Student Participants’ Prior Personal Writing Experiences. ............................................... 55
Data Collection Procedures ........................................................................................................ 55
Scoring Procedure. ............................................................................................................. 57
Instruments and Data Sources. ........................................................................................... 59
Data Analysis and Procedures...................................................................................................... 64
CHAPTER FIVE ........................................................................................................................ 66
FIRST RESEARCH QUESTION ......................................................................................................... 66
CHAPTER SIX ........................................................................................................................... 88
SECOND RESEARCH QUESTION ..................................................................................................... 88
CHAPTER SEVEN................................................................................................................... 107
THIRD RESEARCH QUESTION ...................................................................................................... 107
CHAPTER EIGHT ................................................................................................................... 118
FOURTH RESEARCH QUESTION......................................................................................... 118
CHAPTER NINE ...................................................................................................................... 142
THOUGHTS REGARDING THE CASE STUDY ................................................................... 142
REFERENCES.......................................................................................................................... 156
APPENDIX A: RUBRICS FOR ENGLISH ESSAYS .............................................................. 173
APPENDIX B: TIMED ESSAY TOPICS ................................................................................. 175
APPENDIX C: DISCUSSION SHEETS FOR MULTIPLE DRAFT WRITING .................... 176
APPENDIX D: ESSAY TOPICS FOR MULTIPLE DRAFT WRITING ................................ 177
APPENDIX E: STUDENTS’ INTERVIEW QUESTIONS...................................................... 178
APPENDIX F: TEACHER’S INTERVIEW QUESTIONS...................................................... 182
APPENDIX G: PEER REVIEW GUIDELINE SHEET ........................................................... 187
APPENDIX H: DECISION SHEET FOR SECOND DRAFT ................................................. 188
APPENDIX I: DECISION SHEET FOR FINAL DRAFT ....................................................... 189
CURRICULUM VITAE

vii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1. Levels of Holistic English Score …………………………………………………… 3

Table 1.2. Percentage of Score Range in General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) …………3

Table 1.3. Percentage of Score Range in Department Required Test (DRT………………... 3

Table 1.4. Percentage of GSAT Score Range between 1 Point and 4.99 Points ……………. 4

Table 1.5. Percentage of DRT Score Range between 1 Point and 4.99 Points……………….4

Table 1.6. Percentage of GSAT Score Range between 5.99 Points and 9.99 Points…………5

Table 1.7 Percentage of DRT Score Range Between 5.99 Points and 9.99 Points…………...5

Table 1.8. Percentage of GSAT Score Range between 10 Points and 14.99 Points………….6

Table 1.9. Percentage of DRT Score Range between 10 Points and 14.99 Points……………6

Table 4.1. Participants’ Self-Reporting of Their English Proficiency………………………55

Table 4.2. Data Collection Schedule………………………………………………………….. 58

Table 4.3. Group Discussion Questions for the Multiple-Draft Writing Approach Topics 62

Table 4.4. Procedures for Peer Review Training……………………………………………. 63

Table 4.5. Peer Review Guideline Sheet……………………………………………………….63

Table 6.1. Example of ten-minute Grammar Review Worksheet …………………………. 94

Table 6.2. Example of ten-minute Grammar Review Worksheet…………………………...95

Table 7.1. Student’s grades on the final of theme essays (Theme 1 and Theme 2) and Timed
Essays (Timed 1 and Timed 2………………………………………………………………...108

Table 7.2. Students’ Total Points on the Pretest (Timed 1) and Posttest (Timed 2) in each
category………………………………………………………………………………...………108

Table 7.3. The Distribution of the Points that Students Earned in Each Category of the
Rubric Released by College Entrance Exam Center (CEEC)……………………………...109

Table 7.4. Result of Paired-Samples T test on Students’ Total Points on the Pretest (Timed
1) and posttest (Timed 2) ……………………………………………………………………. 111

Table 7.5. Results of Paired-Sample T test on Timed 1 and Timed 2on the five categories:
Content, Organization, Grammar/Syntax, Vocabulary/Spelling and format……………..111

viii
Table 8.1 Writing Performance of Students Giving Positive Feedback on Peer
Review…………………………………………………………………………………………118

ix
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1. The Flowers and Hayes Model of the Writing Process (1981) ...……………….43

Figure 3.2. The Update Hayes Model of the Writing Process (1996) ………………………46

x
 CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Background and Purpose

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is a required course in Taiwan. Before 2000,

students officially started to take English in the seventh grade. However, to minimize the

differences caused by socioeconomic status, nowadays the Department of Education in Taiwan

has decided that students will start English in third grade. For students from third to ninth grade,

each school has the autonomy to decide how many hours students should study languages (both

Chinese and EFL) under one premise: the total hours of language learning should occupy 20 to

30 percent of the whole curriculum. In the elementary school level (first to sixth grades),

language learning focuses more on the native language, Chinese, but when students start seventh

grade, the proportions of Chinese and EFL are almost equal. One reason for such an arrangement

is that, when students finish ninth grade, they are required to take the Basic Competence Test

(BCT), which covers the major subjects: Chinese, Mathematics, English, Science and Social

Studies. Each subject provides one-fifth of the total score. The English part of the BCT has only

multiple-choice questions, and students are not asked to do any English writing. The results of

the BCT determine students’ options for senior high school. Once students attend senior high

school, the Department of Education in Taiwan requires that every week each high school

curriculum should have four EFL sessions in every semester from 10th grade to 12th grade. But

since EFL is a required academic subject in the college admission exams, most schools actually

offer five or six English sessions, or even more, each week.

When students are in the 12th grade, they can apply for college admission according to

the results of two assessments. One is the Department Required Test (DRT), which covers three

1
years of high school studies in each academic subject. The other is the General Scholastic Ability

Test (GSAT), which covers only the first two years of high school studies. The DRT is

administered after students complete their high school education, usually in July. The GSAT is

administered at the end of the first semester of the 12th grade, usually in January. Students apply

for college admission based on their GSAT scores and, if they are admitted by a college, they do

not have to take the DRT. However, if they are not admitted by any college, they will have to

take the DRT in July. In both the GSAT and the DRT, the full score in the English section is 100

points, and students are required to complete an essay, which accounts for 20 of the total points.

In the essay section, students usually are asked to write a two-paragraph essay of 120 to 150

words. Generally, after deducting the time students spend on answering the 50 multiple-choice

questions and two sentences of Chinese-English translation, students have 20 to 30 minutes to

finish their essays. Completing an essay is viewed as a demonstration of a student’s English

writing ability.

Statement of the Problem

For years, Taiwanese EFL students have been required to write an English essay for the

GSAT or DRT. Based on the data released by the College Entrance Exam Center (CEEC), the

institute in charge of college admission assessments in Taiwan, Table 1.1 shows the scoring

rubric for students’ English writing levels on the GSAT and DRT. Students must achieve at least

10 points to reach the “Fine” level. Students scoring lower than 10 points (i.e., with a score of

≤ 9.99 points) are categorized as either “Poor” or “Very Poor.” However, according to the CEEC

data (Table 1.2), over the period of 2008 through 2012, only about 20 to 30 percent of the

examinees scored ten or more points.

2
Table 1.1. Levels of Holistic English Essay Score
Writing levels Excellent Very good Fine Poor Very poor

Holistic scoring 19-20 15-18 10-14 5-9 0-4

range

Requiring a word count of 120-150, the essay exam is a short paragraph-writing

assessment, which students are assumed to be capable of since they have studied English for at

least eight years. However, almost every year 65 to 75 percent of examinees’ writing

performance on either the GSAT or DRT has been categorized as “Poor” or “Very Poor.” Table

1.2 and Table 1.3 indicate the percentage distribution of scores by range on the GSAT and DRT

from 2008-2012.

Table 1.2. Percentage of Score Range in General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT)
GSAT
Score Range 0≤score≤ 5≤score≤ 10≤score≤ 15≤score≤ 19≤score≤20
4.99 9.99 14.99 18.99
Year
2012 27.71 36.51 30.38 5.37 0.03
2011 26.63 34.61 33.01 5.71 0.04
2010 32.08 38.21 26.19 3.49 0.03
2009 41.24 35.05 20.94 2.63 0.14
2008 32.32 38.52 25.84 3.3 0.02
NO. of examinees: Year 2012:154560; Year 2011:146302; Year 2010: 142129; Year 2009:141858; Year 2008:150014
Data from CEEC website: http://www.ceec.edu.tw/AbilityExam/AbilityEXamSat.htm

Table 1.3. Percentage of Score Range in Department Required Test ( DRT)

DRT
Score Range 0≤score≤ 5≤score≤ 10≤score≤ 15≤score≤ 19≤score≤20
4.99 9.99 14.99 18.99

Year
2012 27.14 36.99 30.75 5.09 0.03
2011 39.34 33.46 23.28 3.88 0.04
2010 36.12 38.43 23.19 2.25 0.01
2009 35.76 40.13 22.04 2.06 0.01
2008 42.05 33.77 20.72 3.44 0.02
NO. of examinees: Year 2012:75839; Year 2011:82164; Year 2010: 83927; Year 2009:87270; Year 2008:93595
Data from CEEC website: http://www.ceec.edu.tw/AppointExam/AppointExamProfile.htm

3
 When students decide to accept college admission based on their GSAT scores, they do

not take the DRT; hence, the number of DRT examinees has always been smaller. On both

exams, except for Years 2011 and 2012, roughly one-third of examinees scored fewer than 5

points, and another one-third scored in range of 5 to 9.99 points. For examinees who were not

categorized as “Poor” or “Very Poor,” the largest percentage often was located in the range of 10

to 14.99 points. In 2008, 2009, and 2010, the population scored in the range of 10 to 14.99 points

was about 20 to 26 percent, although in 2012 and 2011 the GSAT had a higher percentage of

scores over 30. In 2012, the percentage of population with this DRT score was 30.75. The

percentage on each exam scoring between 0 and 4.99 points, categorized as “very poor,” is

shown in Table 1.4 and Table 1.5.

Table 1.4. Percentage of GSAT Score Range between 1 Point and 4.99 Points

Data from CEEC webiste: http://www.ceec.edu.tw/AbilityExam/AbilityEXamSat.htm

Table 1.5. Percentage of DRT Score Range between 1 Point and 4.99 Points

Data from CEEC website: http://www.ceec.edu.tw/AppointExam/AppointExamProfile.htm

4
 The DRT scores do not specify the percentage of examinees who actually score 0 points.

Hence, we know only that, except for year 2009 and year 2012, at least 10 percent of examinees

scored less than one point in each year. The GSAT report provides more thorough information,

indicating that at least 10 percent of examinees typically score 0 points and that an additional 1

or 2 percent of examinees score between .01 and .99 points.

Table 1.6 and Table 1.7 show the percentage of examinees who typically score between 5

and 9.99 points, categorized as “Poor.” In both tables, the percentages are distributed

Table 1.6. Percentage of GSAT Score Range between 5.99 Points and 9.99 Points

Data from CEEC webiste: http://www.ceec.edu.tw/AbilityExam/AbilityEXamSat.htm

Table 1.7. Percentage of DRT Score Range between 5.99 Points and 9.99 Points

Data from CEEC website: http://www.ceec.edu.tw/AppointExam/AppointExamProfile.htm

fairly evenly in each point range, about 6 to 8 percent. However, Table 1.8 and Table 1.9 show

that, for the score range that is categorized as “Fine,” the greatest number of scores are

distributed fairly evenly among the three columns showing scores of 10 to 10.99, 11 to 11.99,

and 12 to 12.99. Both GSAT and DRT scores display a similar pattern. Hence, we may say that,

5
in the “Fine” range, the examinees’ scores on both exams were closer to 10 points and more

distant from 14.99 points.

Table 1.8. Percentage of GSAT Score Range between 10 Points and 14.99 Points

Data from CEEC website: http://www.ceec.edu.tw/AbilityExam/AbilityEXamSat.htm

Table 1.9. Percentage of DRT Score Range between 10 Points and 14.99 Points

Data from CEEC website: http://www.ceec.edu.tw/AppointExam/AppointExamProfile.htm

In conclusion, even though nearly 25 percent of examinees scored between 10 and 20

points, the fact is that those percentages were concentrated in the range between 10 and 13 points.

In contrast, comparatively few examinees earned scores of 13 to 14.99. As to the 75 percent of

examinees who were diagnosed as “Poor,” 10 percent of them scored 0 points on the GSAT, and

a similar percentage of DRT examinees no doubt would be in the 0-point category if that exam

reported scores of 0.

6
 After examinees had studied English for at least eight years, most of them failed to write

a satisfactory short-paragraph essay. Such unsatisfactory writing performance is worth

investigating, especially the issues that led to their categorization as poor writers. Patthery-

Chavez and Valdes (2004) stated that feedback from instructors or peers and instruction in which

students participate in a series of revisions of their own writings are important factors for

students’ writing development. However, the mandatory English curriculum in Taiwan does not

specify the number of hours for English writing. As a result, the amount of time students spend

on writing depends entirely on the individual teacher.

The premise of the present study is that writing takes time and is a recursive process of

exploring, editing and revising (Sommers, 1980; Flower and Hayes, 1981; Eaigley and Witte,

1981; Zamel, 1983). When students are given opportunities to experience such a recursive

process, they display better writing performance. Studies (Raimes, 1983; Cooper and Odell,

1999; Condon and Kelly-Riley’s, 2004) have indicated that when students write without time

pressure, they might have more opportunities to explore and think over essay topics and perform

better. However, to meet the English writing requirement for the admission exams in Taiwan, it is

the case that high school students in Taiwan must write an essay within a limited time, regardless

of familiarity with the topic or inequities in educational background. Hence, instructors in

Taiwan should guide students to practice writing effectively and efficiently with the knowledge

that they have acquired for years, no matter what their English competencies may be, in order to

prepare them for the writing assessments.

Rationale of the Study

The researcher was interested in identifying factors that influence the writing

performance of students whose English proficiency was at the low and intermediate levels. By

7
merging a process writing approach with the school’s tight EFL schedule, the researcher hoped to

devise a feasible model for writing teachers.

This case study, therefore, focuses on a high school EFL teacher’s perceptions and

adjustments while teaching writing to students with low to low-intermediate English competency

with the implementation of a localized multiple-draft writing approach with peer review and both

student-student and teacher-student discussion meetings, with the goal of preparing them to write

essays using the abilities that they had previously attained. This investigation explored the

evolution of the teacher’s beliefs and experiences in implementing this approach, the students’

perceptions of its usefulness as preparation for their timed essay writing on admission exams,

and the effects of the approach on their timed and untimed writing.

Research Questions

1. How does a high school EFL writing teacher modify his teaching approach to support

students’ writing development in the area of linguistic usage and content development?

2. How does the teacher’s perception of the multiple-draft approach change during the 13-

session implementation period with the collaboration of a colleague who is

knowledgeable about the multiple draft approach?

3. What specific writing changes do Taiwanese high school EFL students show between

pretest and posttest on DRT and GSAT timed essay topics in the areas of content,

organization, grammar/syntax, vocabulary/spelling and format awareness, as scored by

the rubric released by the College Admission Entrance Center (CAE) in Taiwan?

4. How do students’ experiences with multiple-draft writing influence their responses to

peer review, teacher-student discussion meetings, and teacher comments, and what

8
 decisions do students make in response to the teacher’s suggestions, peer suggestions and

input?

Significance of the Study

There were three main reasons for conducting this study. One was to raise high school

EFL students’ awareness of the writing process and thereby prepare them to be independent

writers in the future. A second was to build student autonomy by introducing a multiple-draft

writing approach in which the instructor scaffolds students’ writing in various ways. The third

was to gauge the teacher’s own changing perspectives on how to teach writing.

Rather than viewing writing as grammar-driven product, with emphasis on knowledge of

language delivered in lectures and imitation of different texts (Pincas, 1982; Badger and White,

2000), this study focuses on opening communications among the writers, readers and the

instructor. In this approach writers plan, draft, edit and review texts through different forms of

communication such as discussion, teacher-student conferences, and peer review. With the short-

term goal of overcoming the challenge of writing for admission exams, students worked on the

topics given in previous admission exams to familiarize themselves with multiple-draft practices.

As to the long-term goal, this study was designed to build an evidence-based exemplary

demonstration of high school EFL writing instruction in Taiwan. With such instruction, writers

can recognize the function of the multiple-draft approach and transfer such processes in the

future to other tasks, such as writing a letter or preparing formal documents in English.

9
 CHAPTER TWO

The Factors Interwoven In Writing

Facets of High-Stakes Writing

“The term high-stakes is commonly used among test developers when referring to a test

whose results are the basis for making life-altering decision about people” (McDonald, 2007, p.

17). In Taiwan, the grade earned on the English writing section of the admission exams is a

major factor in college admission. It is understood that, prior to any writing assessment, students

should first receive writing instruction in the school curriculum. It also is understood that the

raters will be just and fair. When students are learning to write, the teacher, as the rater in the

classroom, should determine each student’s learning pace and provide proper customized advice

to help students to reach the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). However, the reality in

Taiwan of taking critical writing assessments such as the General Scholastic Ability Test

(GSAT), the Department Required Test (DRT), or the Test of English as a Foreign Language

(TOEFL) is that it is impossible for raters to take individual students’ situations into account

while grading. These exams are detached from the ethics of evaluation in the classroom, where

students and the teacher can interact in a less competitive environment. Moreover, these high-

stake assessments have characteristics which raises the stakes higher not only for students, but

also for the teacher. In the GSAT and DRT exams, the grade report of each student is mailed to

the senior high school in which he or she is enrolled. Both the school administration and the

teacher would like to see students performing at a high level, and this means that there is

pressure to perform on both students and teacher. Hence, the student who has ambition of

receiving a good writing grade and the teacher who wants to earn a reputation as an effective

instructor must both work hard. Unfortunately, the lack of established guidelines on the amount

10
of time that must be devoted to writing instruction coupled with the leeway that individual

teachers have, as a result, to teach English as they best deem appropriate has led to wide

disparities in the effectiveness of English programs throughout Taiwan as measured by the

GSAT and DRT exams.

When it comes to writing instruction, the writing teacher’s responsibility is to help

students tackle a topic with proper writing skills. To ensure students’ progress in writing, writing

teachers often encourage students to work at a slower pace in class. However, such a moderate

approach to writing may be counterproductive when it comes to standardized writing

assessments, a contradiction which makes both teachers and students feel oppressed (Freire,

1970).

First, there is no short-cut in terms of writing practices. Students must experience how to

brainstorm, associate their thinking with past experience, organize their ideas, edit their

paragraphs and revise their sentences so that they actually learn how to write. However, learning

how to apply those writing strategies takes time. When students feel unqualified, they may be

reluctant to undertake any sort of writing activities. If a teacher overlooks students’ difficulties,

students may feel oppressed by the pedagogy.

Second, an evaluation of students’ writing performance also is an evaluation of the

effectiveness of a teacher’s instruction. In a sense, writing teachers have to provide effective

guidelines so that students are better motivated or inspired to write essays that reflect their own

thinking. When students can demonstrate good writing competency, the credit goes to both

teacher and student. But if students demonstrate poor writing competency as a group, the writing

instruction offered by the teacher may be called into question.

11
 Third, there are uncontrollable issues at the core of any writing assessment, and the

process of evaluating writing is full of subjectivity and uncertainty, such as the inequality caused

by topic familiarity, the bias of raters, or the degree to which a student can perform while feeling

nervous. Those factors may subtly undermine the writing process. In reality, however, the

assessment of timed-writing tasks is the most common approach to evaluating student writing

ability in both Eastern and Western nations. This leaves us no option other than to look for a

pedagogy that suits the students’ needs and, at the same time, leads to stronger performance on

standardized instruments of evaluation.

Linguistic Accuracy under Timed Conditions

Wolcott (1987) drew attention to the contradiction between writing process and direct-

sample writing assessment, emphasizing that “[t]he constraints of a typical testing situation often

work at cross-purpose with current writing-instruction theories, severely curtailing—especially

for weaker writers—any potential application of the process paradigm” (p. 40). White (1995)

described the writing produced in the timed exam as “first- draft writing” (p. 36), which should

be evaluated differently from the writing produced in the classroom context, and asserted that the

nature of timed writing “restricted the world of the student, who must write under time pressure

to someone else’s topic and scoring criteria” (p. 36). It is impossible, however, to create a writing

context that all students are familiar with in any assessment, so large-scale writing assessments

still are inevitable. Hamp-Lyons and Kroll’s (1996) study stated that writers who scored well in

time-limited assessments were not always the writers with a good language competency. They

indicated that writers could perform well under the timed conditions when they had already

developed a clear understanding of the expectations of the timed assessments and learned how to

respond to various tasks under a short span of time. Their findings supported timed assessments,

12
but on the condition that writers receive sufficient training and compensatory skills. However,

time is still an important factor to writers.

Other literature has indicated that student writers performed differently in timed writing

assessments as opposed to other writing situations. Polio and Glew (1996) examined 26 English

as a Second Language (ESL) students who were interviewed immediately after a 30-minute

simulated placement essay exam. The results indicated that those students needed more time to

check what they had written in order to produce better essays. Kroll (1990) found that there was

no significant difference in terms of linguistic accuracy between the essays completed under

timed conditions and those completed without time constraints. However, she stated that, due to

her study design, she had no idea how much time students spent on the untimed essays. Powers

and Fowles (1996) indicated that an increased time allotment did increase writing performance.

Three hundred and four college students who took the Graduate Record Examinations

(GRE),who did not think their writing skills were particularly strong, were paid to participate in

a study in which ethnic minority and nonnative examinees were oversampled to ensure

heterogeneity. They assigned participants to 40-minute and 60-minute writing tasks and

concluded that the students in the 60-minute task scored one standard deviation better than

students in the 40-minute task. To examine different aspects of students’ timed writing, Polio,

Fleck and Leder (1998) sought to determine whether instruction would reduce the number of

sentence-level errors under timed conditions. Their participants spent 30 minutes writing first

drafts, and they later had 60 minutes to revise their writing. The results yielded two conclusions.

One was that students did gradually increase their linguistic accuracy over the course of the

semester from their first drafts to their revised writing products. The other was that students who

received additional editing instruction and feedback did not demonstrate a better linguistic

13
accuracy than others. This claim contradicted the studies conducted by Hamp-Lyons and Kroll’s

(mentioned above). Porte (1996) examined the writing of 15 college Spanish underachievers who

wrote two types of compositions under different time conditions. The results indicated that those

participants revised their essays in a way characteristic of ESL learners. Also, when those

participants revised their essays, their past learning experiences emerged in response to their

current writing tasks. In sum, different factors influence students’ performances in timed

assessments, such as not having sufficient language capacity to correct surface-level mistakes or

lacking skills for writing strategies. Worden (2009) examined the prewriting and revision of 890

timed essays completed by juniors at Washington State University. In this study, any writing that

was directly related to answering the essay prompt questions but was not part of the essay was

considered prewriting. Revision was defined as any visual changes made to the essay body. Nine

researchers worked collectively to identify the significant features of those essays and devised a

system to code them. The results indicated that revision was often associated with lower scores

than prewriting. Hence, Worden concluded that, to help students succeed in timed writing,

educators should coach students to work more on prewriting and discourage extensive revision.

Even though this study was not designed specifically for learners of a second language (L2), her

conclusion delivered the message that scaffolding preparation before writing is necessary for a

writer.

Some studies have investigated the effectiveness of using knowledge acquired in one’s

mother tongue or first language (L1) in the L2 learning environment. Friedlander (1990)

conducted a study on information generation, finding that when writers encountered a topic that

they had experienced in L1, it was a benefit to their ability to write in L2. De Larios et (1999)

collected think-aloud data from five intermediate Spanish speakers learning EFL, and they

14
concluded that in the L2 writing process, participants expanded, elaborated on, and reorganized

the ideas brought to the writing task from their L1. Wang and Wen (2002) indicated that, in

writing, English language learners used their L1 to brainstorm or organize ideas, but they relied

on L2 to undertake task-examining and text-generating activities. In investigating the role L2

might also play in the timed essay, Pappamihiel, Nishimata and Mihai (2008) conducted a study

in which the participants were 27 adult ESL language learners who had enrolled in an intensive

English program at a university in Florida. Participants were asked to brainstorm in their native

language to generate ideas about an essay topic, and they then had 30 minutes to write a five-

paragraph essay. Two days later, they were asked to use the target language English to do the

brainstorming before writing an essay in the same 30-minute time frame. After the essays were

scored using an analytic method, the score data were analyzed in a software package to look for

differences in level of English proficiency between brainstorming in L1 and brainstorming in L2.

The results indicated that, under timed conditions, students at the beginning levels of English

proficiency did not benefit from using their native language under timed-writing conditions.

There were two explanations for such results. One is that switching from L1 to L2 in the

intervention stages may decrease processing speed and short-term memory. The other is that,

even though they did generate the ideas in L1, they were not equipped with the ability to express

the ideas and concepts they had brainstormed in English.

Hence, it might not be appropriate to apply timed assessments to all writers because the

playing field is not level in terms of the individual participant’ ability to manage time and to

draw on previous life experiences that might relate to a topic. However, despite the fact that

concerns have always existed in regard to whether the first draft can reflect a student’s actual

writing ability in timed assessment exercises, the reality of the situation is that the timed

15
assessment is still the most convenient approach to determining a writer’ level of proficiency in

the target language.

Prompt Topics in Writing Assessments

Many studies have focused on the relation between the essay topic and students’ writing

performance (Atwell, 1985; Hoetker, 1982; Ruth and Murphy, 1984; Brossell and Ash, 1984;

Brown, Hilgers, and Marsella, 1991). Due to the fact that students’ familiarity with essay topics

may influence their writing performance, McColly (1970) suggested that a valid writing topic

should be able to filter out the effects of prior knowledge. Freeman’s study (1983) of freshmen

from selective schools showed that when the descriptions of the topics were more difficult than

newspaper reading level, students considered those topics more challenging than the topics for an

issue paper. Carlman (1986) studied essay topics themselves and found significant differences in

the types of writing, not in the writing topics.

Significant differences, however, have been found among individual students’ essay

scores on different topics. Tedick (1990) concluded that that topics clearly play a role in writing

assessments. Her participants were 105 international students enrolled in ESL composition

courses, the levels of which were determined by their performance on an ESL diagnostic

examination. They all responded to two topics. One was the general topic, and the other

pertained to the subjects’ fields of study. Three weeks later, the same students responded to a

field-specific prompt. The results indicated that the students’ performance on the field-specific

topics were better than their performance on a general topic, and that the field-specific topic can

filter the different levels of writing proficiency among groups more effectively. When students

wrote, their personal experience or educational background influenced their writing products

because their product delivered the individuality and the expertise of themselves. However, how

16
a reader appreciated a piece of writing product was rather subjective. If a rater was not able to

appreciate the ideas that a writer described in the essay, or if the rater’s background was so

different from that of the writer that it was impossible for the rater to comprehend the writer’s

viewpoints on certain issues, raters might assign a low score to those writing products.

Carlson and Bridgeman (1986) argued that writing topics should be fair so as not to favor

any person’s knowledge and cultural background. In Lee and Anderson’s (2007) study, by

controlling participants’ language proficiency based on TOEFL scores, they had their ESL

participants first watch a 10-minute videotaped lecture on an academic topic and then gave them

an article on the same topic but described from another perspective. Students were given 50

minutes to integrate the two perspectives in an essay. Their results indicated that students’

majors were not related to their writing performance, but different topics did affect writing

performance.

He and Shi (2012) studied how the specific topic affected ESL writing performance. Fifty

participants in a Canadian college across three language proficiency levels - basic, intermediate,

and advanced - were asked to write timed impromptu essays. One topic required general

knowledge of university studies, and the other required specific knowledge about the Canadian

federal government. The results indicated that students of all three language proficiencies

performed significantly better on the general topic than on the specific topic. Students had

difficulties in developing ideas, taking an explicit position, and drawing conclusions on the

specific topic. Due to students’ diversities of opinion, experience and knowledge, writing topics

will affect students’ writing performance. Hence, it is important to assign a topic on any

assessment that will minimize the inequities.

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The Issue of the Reliability of Raters and the Adaptability of Criteria

In many large-scale writing assessment, it is impossible for all papers to be rated by one

person. In addition, the fluctuation of a rater’s mood or the changes in a rater’s life may affect a

rater’s decision on assigning a grade to a writing piece. In 1971 Coffman investigated the issues

of inter-rater and intra-rater variability as major concerns in the grading process. In regard to

inter-rater variability, he reached the following conclusions:

For example, the grades assigned by different raters may differ as a result of various
influences. First, raters may differ in their severity. One may characteristically assign
relatively high grades while another may tend to assign generally low grades. If some
papers are rated by one rater and other papers are rated by another rater, then the level
of the mark an examinee receives will depend on which rater happens to rate his
paper. Second, raters may differ in the extent to which they distribute grades
throughout the score scale. Some tend to distribute scores closely around their
average; others will spread scores much more widely. The good student hopes that his
paper will be read by the rater who gives few low (or high) scores. Finally, raters
differ in the relative values they assign to different papers. A paper judged high by
one rater may be judged low by another. (p. 2)

While Coffman clearly identifies these inter-rater issues as reasons to question the

validity of essay scores on large-scale writing tests with multiple raters, he also raised major

concerns about intra-rater variability:

This intra-rater variability, like the inter-rater variability discussed above, consists of
three components, one related to the relative standard for different papers, one to the
general grading standard and the third to the variability of the rating. In other words,
if a teacher rates a set of paper twice without setting up objective controls of some
sort, the relative standing of some pupils will shift. In addition, the average rating will
be higher one time than the other, and there will be differences in the extent to which
the scores are spread out over the range of the ratings. (pp. 27-28)
The subjectivity of a single rater causes inequality in rating results. Considering the

nature of the inter-rater variability and intra-rater variability, it is obvious that personal

preferences do exist in the process of rating essays. Hence, to diminish those inequalities, the

rating criteria play a crucial role in preventing the raters from demonstrating too much

subjectivity.

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 Jonsson and Svingby (2007) investigated 75 studies which related to the use of scoring

rubrics. They concluded that, with rubrics, the criteria are explicitly explained and – along with

the exemples used in rater training – can improve the reliability of performance assessment

scoring. In addition, rubrics seemed to have the potential to improve instruction and learning.

Hence, it is necessary that learners know the details of the rubrics and how their product will be

evaluated. Cumming (1990) indicated that expert raters had a tendency to use a wider range of

criteria and to integrate their own interpretations and judgments into both situational and textual

features of the composition. Wolfe et al. (1998) demonstrated that highly proficient raters

focused more on the general features of an essay and stayed close to the rating categories in the

scoring rubrics. All of these studies emphasize that the differences among raters influence the

validity of essay rating and, the more experienced a rater is, the more appropriate the score that

may be assigned.

Lumley (2002) investigated the process of how experienced raters made their decisions

when employing an analytic rating scale designed for a written test for ESL learners. Participants

were four trained, experienced, reliable raters, and they were provided with two sets of 24 texts.

The first set was from an operation rating and, in the second set, raters followed think-aloud

protocol and described the rating process in real time as they rated. The results indicated that the

relations between scale contents and text quality remain obscure. However, this study

demonstrated that, to some degree, first impressions influenced raters’ decisions. When raters

had to cope with problematic issue in the rating process, they would try to remain close to the

scale. Unfortunately, they already had been influenced by their first complex intuitive impression

of the text. Regardless of the conflict between rater and intuitive impression, rating does require

constraining procedures if the measurement is to be reliable. When raters were supported by

19
proper training or guidelines which instruct them to deal with problems, rating may be successful

in yielding consistent scores.

In 2008, Eckes investigated whether experienced raters would follow the scoring criteria.

The participants were 64 experienced teachers who had been systematically trained to follow the

scoring guidelines in the field of teaching German as a Second Language. In addition to giving

information on their professional experience and background, those teachers rated the

importance of nine criteria for evaluating students on a four-point scale (i.e., less important,

important, very important, and extremely important). The criteria were fluency, train of thought,

structure, completeness, description, argumentation, syntax, vocabulary, and correctness. The

results indicated that raters differed significantly in their views of the importance of various

criteria, and raters’ background variables seemed to be responsible for the scoring profile

differences. Those studies once again hinged on the importance of the rating training and rater’s

level of experience. Correlating the reliability and the validity of the rater’s score has always

been an issue in any writing assessment.

In selecting the scoring criteria for writing, holistic scoring rubrics and analytical scoring

rubrics are common choices. Analytical scoring rubrics accentuate the individual elements of the

responses to a question and then assign a grade to each single element separately. The sum of all

single grades became the final score (McDonald, 2007). Holistic rubrics consider all the features

of an essay viewed as a whole. This criterion is often adopted by the school teacher after students

have completed their writing. In a sense, which rubric to choose depends on the characteristics of

the assessments and the teaching objectives. When segments of students’ responses overlap,

when there is no precise answer for the question, or when a teacher must score a set of writing

rapidly, a holistic scoring rubric might be the better choice. But when a teacher needs to clearly

20
provide the strengths or the weaknesses of a student’s response items, or give some feedback on

the appropriateness of certain writing parts, an analytical scoring rubric may be preferred.

Furthermore, we also may view the scoring as a tool that delineates the boundary of the rater’s

subjectivity. Hence, in order to bring fairness to any writing assessment, it is essential to pick out

the appropriate criteria for raters to follow.

Oppression in Writing Assessments

According to Freire (1970, 2007), “Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose

humanity has been stolen, but also those (through a different way) who have stolen it, is a

distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human” (p. 44). This suggests that that both

the oppressors and the oppressed have a distorted humanity and, with time, when their roles

change, their behavior and minds change as well. In educational settings, the teachers’

perspective is that they were once students who were taught to obey the discipline, accept the

moral standard, and absorb knowledge from teachers or parents. They presumably know what it

is like to not be allowed to pursue things of interest in their own way at different stages in their

learning. However, once they become the teachers, they choose to act as their teachers did, even

though they know how oppressed they felt by being unable to be themselves. Their change of

role does not result in their liberation from being oppressed. In a school setting, when the school

administrators or the parents expect to see students’ good academic performances, they give the

pressure to the teachers; hence, in the classroom, students are the oppressed, and the teachers

become the oppressors. When it comes to writing, teachers expect students to draw on their own

experiences and their genuine feelings. Meanwhile, through the teacher’s feedback, students are

able to determine if their thoughts were appreciated, and they can modify the direction of their

writing to meet the teacher’s expectations. However, when students are taking a high-stake

21
writing assessment, it is as if their minds are in shackles. They must consider what content the

raters might favor and avoid making too strong an impression, which may depict a vivid image

of themselves that is not in keeping with the rater’s biases. There is, after all, no way to know the

preferences of any rater before taking a high-stakes writing assessment.

To sum up, with writing assessments, students, whether consciously or subconsciously,

may not express their own voices unless their points of view are consistent with those held by the

majority. Hence, writing assessments dehumanize students somewhat, and force them to speak

invisibly in unison. Foreign language learners may not only struggle with the viewpoints they are

expected to express in writing assessments, but they also struggle with how to present their ideas

with better organization, syntax, and terminology.

Lipson and Wixson (2003) stated, “It is our belief that instructional decisions should

never be made solely on the basis of formal assessment instruments. It is absolutely essential that

formal tests be followed up with informal measures that are more reflective of classroom

demands before decisions are made” (p. 376). These researchers value the low-stakes writing in

the classroom and the importance of in-class informal assessment as preparation for the formal

assessment. However, factors such as the validity and reliability of the score, the rater’s

presuppositions and preferences, and students’ concerns mean that the writing assessments are

manipulated by different oppressors under different circumstances as a means to controlling

students, teachers, and schools’ curriculum. Such a political system forms the school ecology,

under which students want grades, teachers need effective teaching evidence, and schools need a

good reputation to gain parents’ trust and get recognition in the community. These oppressing

forces impel the oppressed (students, teachers, and schools) to do what they are expected. When

the oppressed are not aware of their personal identities and gradually become used to doing what

22
they have been told, they will view unfair treatment from the oppressors as normal. Narrowly

speaking, when students are only guided to write time-limited writing assessments, they will get

used to a restricted way of writing. They may not be given opportunities to explore outside the

curriculum or to realize their potential, and they eventually forget the importance of their own

freedom in making themselves understood and how important it is to evoke readers’ interest.

Through timed-restricted assessments, we may not hear the insightful voices of students, but

struggling, stereotyped, or meaningless voices instead. Hence, in a writing class, we should

cherish each student’s uniqueness since the purpose of classroom pedagogy is to inspire students

to be all that they can be. If our educational system turns into a system that restricts students’

critical thinking or individual opinions, the curriculum has become an obstacle to the application

of pedagogy. In the future, when the students grow up, they will turn into an audience that

always follows restrictive rules. In sum, education ecology is a domain full of oppressors and the

oppressed. Schools force teachers, teachers force students, and students’ performance forces

schools to force teachers to force students to all shift back and forth between the roles of

oppressor and oppressed under various circumstances.

Every individual has unrestricted freedom of his or her own mind, with which he or she

can express identity by receiving comments from others, criticizing others, fighting in disputes,

or feeling touched or accepted in various circumstances. Those characteristics can be displayed

vividly in one’s writing. Through the life sharing of the author, writing comes alive and connects

the author’s identity with the audience. In other words, writing is a product that sells an author’s

ideas and experiences in such a way as to evoke a resonance between readers and texts. Hence,

without the author’s true experience interwoven in his or her texts, readers are unlikely to be

moved. In a similar sense, when students want to work on meaningful writing, they have to take

23
ownership of their minds. Such claim of ownership develops in the process of low-stakes writing,

which takes time to practice and, as such, is the opposite of the high-stakes writing that requires

students to demonstrate their ability during a restricted time span.

Facets of Low-Stakes Writing

Low-stakes writing releases writers’ minds. It can apply to all genres. In doing so,

students are less stressed and better encouraged to write down what they have in mind because

performance will not be evaluated immediately. Such reassurance enables students to brainstorm

ideas, develop confidence, and maintain interest in improving the consistency of their written

expression (Elbow and Sorcinelli, 2005). Besides reducing students’ nervousness and their

reluctance to write, another goal of low-stakes writing is that frequent writing practice may help

students develop a habit of writing. Hence, low-stakes writing approaches such as online writing,

multiple-draft writing, and portfolio writing are adopted in the curriculum. There is no denying

that, in any writing, an author’s voice should be heard. It is important that we emancipate

students from stereotyped concepts and cultivate their sense of criticism by reinforcing their

ability to question, demonstrate and reconstruct knowledge in confidence (Leonardo, 2004).

When inducing students’ own voices, teachers provide students with approaches to help

reconstruct the commonplace, interrogate multiple viewpoints, focus on sociopolitical issues,

take action, and prompt social justice (Lewison, Flint and Sluys, 2002). Hence, in remodeling

students’ recognition of incidents around them and in rebuilding their own comprehension of old

concepts, instructors provide students with opportunities to think, rethink, deconstruct, and

reconstruct so as to generate ideas connected to their own experience and identity. Those

approaches could be described as student-centered, aiming at the development of students’ self-

24
recognized knowledge, which in turn allows them to reject fixed answers and look out for

themselves.

Writing Is a Recursive Process of Making Meaning

A complete writing essay should not be a writer’s first draft; instead, it should be a

product that reflects a writer’s efforts, ideas, and writing skills. Murray (1972) stated that, rather

than focus on teaching to the finished writing product, we should teach about the writing process.

Hence, he divided the writing process into three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting.

Flower and Hayes (1981) formed a model that emphasized the inventive and generative nature of

the composing process, explaining the relationship among task environment, the writer’s long-

term memory, and the writing processes and how those categories are interwoven with each other.

A study by Eaigley and Witte (1981) indicated that when writers write, no matter how excellent

their writing abilities are, they will always revise and rethink, and they constantly brainstorm as

they explore a topic and evaluate their own writing products. The only difference between

writers with high abilities and those with low abilities is how many changes and what kind of

changes they made to their products. Sommers (1980) conducted a study about writers’ strategies

of revision. The results revealed that advanced writers consider revision to be integral to the job

of writing, and this perspective always leads them to think more and write more in the process.

These studies underscore the generative nature of writing and state that students have their own

priorities in composing essays due to their different writing abilities.

Writers are individuals with different writing competencies, interests, purposes, and

personalities, and they make their own choices in dealing with writing tasks. In 1971, Emig’s

study concluded that students have many different writing behaviors, and those behaviors reveal

the nonlinear nature of the writing process. Unfortunately, writing teachers often oversimplify

25
the fact that students write in different ways. Perl (1980) found that both skilled and unskilled

writers develop new ideas in the writing process. However, the unskilled writers are less capable

of developing new ideas because they are concerned more with surface-level errors in their

writing products. In 1983, Zamel indicated that only after skilled ESL writers complete their

original thoughts are they able to start paying attention to exploring and clarifying other ideas or

language-related concerns. Writers have various writing concerns. Hence, it is dehumanizing to

constrain students by having them respond to certain topics in a limited span of time while

expecting them to perform at their best.

Teaching Grammar in Foreign Language Learning

The formal teaching of grammar has long been a debate in L2 language acquisition.

Corder (1967, 1988) and Krashen (1981) share a similar viewpoint on this topic. Corder believes

that learners have a built-in syllabus for learning grammar, and in his later study he discussed his

own use of the Grammar Translation Method (GMT) and stated that GMT, with its roots in

pedagogical grammar, promote communicative competence in second language learners.

Krashen (1981) stated that grammar instruction played no role in acquisition and indicated that,

when learners have access to comprehensible input and are highly motivated, their built-in

syllabi would automatically come to play. Empirical studies (Pica, 1983; Long, 1983; White,

Spade, Lightbown, and Ranta, 1991) investigated the order of acquisition with instructed learners

and naturalistic learners. The results indicated that, even though both instructed and naturalistic

learners follow the same acquisition order, and even though there is no guarantee that learners

will absorb what they have been taught, instructed learners make progress more quickly and

achieve higher levels of proficiency. Those studies suggested that there is a benefit to the

teaching of grammar. Later, some researchers emphasized the communicative purpose of

26
learning grammar. Yalden (1991) stated that communication is the main motivation for applying

a language. Halliday (1994) emphasized that the function of applying grammar is to express

oneself in experience or to interact with people. Ur (1996) said that “the aim of grammar practice

is to get students to learn the structures so thoroughly that they will be able to produce them

correctly on their own” (p. 83). Bade indicated that grammar translation methods, situational

language teaching methods, and audio-lingual methods define the meaning of grammar in

educational contexts. Based on those scholars’ descriptions, the teaching of grammar seems

limited to the presentation and the practice of grammatical items.

In 2006, Ellis stated the broader definition of grammar teaching as follows:

Grammar teaching involves any instructional technique that draws learners’ attention
to some specific grammatical form in such a way that it helps them either to
understand it metalinguistically or process it in comprehension and/or production so
that they can internalize. (p. 84)

Ellis’s definition posited an extensive function of grammar teaching. Bastone and Ellis

(2008) provided 3 principles for grammar teaching. One is the Given-to-New Principle, which

emphasizes the process of guiding learners to perceive new information by exploiting what they

already know. Another is the Awareness Principle, which focuses on making learners aware of

how a particular meaning is encoded in a particular grammatical form, stressing that they have to

recognize that the forms they have attended to encode particular grammatical meaning. The third

principle is the Real-Operating Conditions Principle, which stresses offering opportunities for

learners to practice language that they can apply in real-life situations. Those principles focus on

the communication phase.

Richard and Rodgers (2001) described that the goal of studying a foreign language is to

read the literature or receive benefit from the mental discipline and intellectual development that

27
language learning requires. They summarized the function of the Grammar Translation Method

(GMT) as follows:

Grammar Translation is a way of studying a language…first through detailed analysis

of its grammar rules, followed by application of this knowledge to the task of
translating sentences and texts into and out of the target language. It hence views
language learning as consisting of little more than memorizing rules and facts. (pp. 3-4)

Azar (2007) further indicated that “students who cannot understand how a sentence is

structured also cannot readily see how one sentence is related to another or how the sentences in

a paragraph relate” (p. 2). Her statement was based on observation of her college students who

could not meet academic expectations though they had received schooling in the US for four to

eight years. Azar stated that students with structure problems who didn’t have a basic

understanding of grammar concepts were often unable to reach a high-enough level of academic

language skills to continue their university studies. Hence, it is necessary to offer grammar

instruction to learners. What grammar to offer and how to offer it depend on a teacher’s

pedagogical beliefs, which often come from their own learning experience when they were

students, as well as from their professional experience and what they learned in teacher

education.

Borg (1999) stated that “teachers’ decisions in teaching grammar were influenced by the

oftenconflicting cognitions about languages, learning in general, L2 learning, grammar teaching,

students, and self. Thus, grammar teaching often reflected the resolution of conflicts among

competing cognitions held by the teacher.” (p. 26) Hence, a teacher’s attitude toward grammar

teaching may result in the differential effectiveness of classroom instruction. Eisenstein-

Ebsworth and Schweers (1997) investigated teachers’ views about conscious grammar

instruction. The participants were 60 EFL university teachers in New York and Puerto Rico.

They received interviews and questionnaires. The results revealed that 41 teachers reported that

28
they had a well-defined approach to teaching grammar in which they had confidence, and that

teachers in Puerto Rico were more in favor of conscious grammar instruction than those in New

York. As one Puerto Rican teacher explained, “grammar has always been part of our language

learning experience. We see no reason to abandon it totally” (p. 247). Horwitz (1990) and Kern

(1995) have argued that mismatches between foreign language students’ and teachers’ beliefs

might affect students’ satisfaction in learning the language and result in the discontinuation of

their study. In 1996, Schulz conducted a study to compare students’ and teachers’ attitudes

toward grammar instruction in foreign language learning in general, and toward error correction

in particular. Students’ data were collected by using multiple-choice questionnaires from 340

students taking German language classes at the University of Arizona. Then, a follow-up study

using the same methodology was conducted with students in Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian,

Japanese, Russian and Spanish language classes during the spring semester 1994. Hence, the

total sample size was 824. Questionnaires with items corresponding to students’ questionnaires

were also mailed to 213 instructors of these same languages, plus ESL, at the University of

Arizona. Ninety-two instructors completed and returned the questionnaires. Data from both

groups was simplified by reorganizing the five-point scale used to elicit responses (agree

strongly, agree, undecided, disagree slightly, disagree, and disagree strongly) into a three-point

scale (agree/strongly, undecided, disagree/strongly). The results revealed that, regardless of what

language students were learning, they indicated a preference for formal grammar instruction and

error correction over their teachers’ preferences, and some obvious discrepancies appeared

between teachers’ and students’ beliefs. For example, 90 percent of students gave a rating of

“disagree” to the statement Teachers should not correct students when they make mistakes in the

class.” By contrast, only about 50 percent of the teachers gave a rating of “disagree” to the

29
statement Teachers should not correct students’ pronunciation or grammatical errors in class

unless these errors interfere with comprehensibility. Additionally, nearly 90 percent of students

expressed agreement with When I make errors in speaking this language, I would like my teacher

to correct them. By contrast, only about 40 percent of teachers gave an “agree” response to the

corresponding item on their questionnaire: Generally, when students make errors in speaking the

target language, they should be corrected. Hence, language teachers should make efforts to

explore students’ needs and beliefs so as to establish a satisfactory learning setting that can meet

their own expectations and students’ expectations. Following this study, in 2001, Schulz

compared this data with the data collected from 607 Colombian foreign language students and

122 of their teachers in order to investigate students’ and teacher’s perceptions concerning the

role of explicit grammar instruction and corrective feedback in foreign language learning. The

results indicated that the foreign language students and teachers in the USA and Colombia have

similar attitudes and beliefs in regard to grammar learning, but there are some discrepancies

between the two cultures. When students were given the statement I believe my foreign language

improves most quickly if I study and practice the grammar of the language and the teacher was

given the corresponding statement Generally speaking, students’ communicative ability improves

most quickly if they study and practice the grammar of the language, 48 percent of American

students and 38 percent of American teachers gave “agree/strongly” responses while the majority

of students (77 percent) and teachers (71 percent) in Colombia gave the “agree/strongly agree”

response. In addition, 76 percent of Colombian students strongly agreed with I like the study of

grammar, while only 30 percent of their teachers endorsed it. On the same question, 48 percent

of American students agreed with I like the study of grammar, while only 18 percent of

American teachers endorsed it. As to the question There should be more formal study of

30
grammar in my FL/L2 course, 51 percent of Colombia students agreed while only 31 percent of

their teachers agreed. On this same question only 26 percent of American students agreed, and

21 percent of US teachers agreed. Hence, we may say that different perceptions and preferences

are rooted in culture differences. But no matter what differences there are, it is obvious that

foreign language teachers in or outside the US have to make an effort to understand their

students’ perceptions and expectations of language learning in order to eliminate the potential

conflicts from the learning process.

Brown (2009) conducted a study to identify and compare teachers’ and students’ ideas of

effective teacher behavior. Participants were 49 teachers between ages of 21-35 and about 1600

of their students were recruited on a volunteer basis from 83 first-year and second-year L2

classes at 9 different universities. Participants received the 24-item Likert-Scale questionnaire on

perception of effective L2 teaching, and also a demographic questionnaire. Each teacher filled

out an Effective Teacher questionnaire. The results indicated that students favor a grammar-

based approach while their teacher prefer a more communicative classroom, and students feel

that effective teaching involves checking oral mistakes immediately while teachers are not so

convinced. Furthermore, students’ ideas changed between their first year of study and their

second year of study. In the first year students might have had unrealistic expectations of

language learning. Hence, the language teacher should enlighten them the difficulties they might

expect to encounter and on how instruction will be modified to meet students’ learning needs. In

a word, foreign language teachers should seek out their students’ perspectives and discuss the

rationale of the instructional strategies with them.

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Perspectives on Peer Review and Teacher Comments

Researchers claiming that students prefer peer review in L1 writing to teacher comments

(Pierson, 1967) reasoned that peers could provide a “more compelling impetus” for student

authors to revise (Clifford, 1981, p. 50). Through communicative dialogue accompanied with a

review process, students received an increased sense of companionship and support from their

peers. As such, students had a tendency to incorporate suggestions from their peer review

sessions into their products (Elbow, 1973). However, this function of peer review may not apply

to the L2-learning setting. Nelson and Murphy (1993a) argued that English learners from

different cultures experience different sorts of classroom interaction. For example, in China the

teacher is typically regarded as an intellectual authority. These authors conducted a study to

investigate whether L2 students incorporated advice given by their peers in a response group.

The participants were students from Chile, Colombia, Peru and Taiwan at the intermediate level

of a university program who were videotaped once per week for six consecutive weeks. The

degree to which peer comments were adopted in their essays was rated on a scale of 1 to 5. The

results indicated that students made some changes in their drafts based on the input they received

from their peers, but not consistently. However, when writers had the opportunities to interact

with their peers in a cooperative manner, they were inclined to adopt peer advice, and vice versa.

Caulk (1994) conducted a study to investigate the dynamics of peer response activities.

Participants ranged from the immediate to advanced levels, and were either studying English or

studying to be English teachers in a university course in Germany. Students wrote three essays in

one semester and revised each once. Both students and Caulk commented on students’ drafts.

Results indicated that 89 percent of the students made comments that Caulk considered valid,

and 60 percent gave valid suggestions that Caulk did not include. Though peer responses

32
provided specific and useful advice, those comments didn’t replace the general comments

offered by Caulk. Teachers’ comments were more valued than peer review.

Mendonca and Johnson (1994) investigated how students’ revisions were influenced by

peer review. Results indicated that, in almost 50 percent of all instances, students used peer

advice while 10 percent decided to not use the advice and about 40 percent made changes that

were not from their peers. Rollinson (1998) also examined how peer reviews influenced students’

revision, and the results revealed that over half of the peers revised their writing effectively with

the advice from peer readers. Rollinson (2005) indicated that peer review encourages and

motivates writers. It is different from the one-way interaction between the teacher and the

students, during which students may be forced to agree with every comment that the teacher

offers. Instead, a collaborative dialogue between the peer readers and the writer helps the writer

determine whether his or her opinions were understood and met the reader’s expectations.

Compared to the direct critique from the teacher, peers showed more empathy toward the L2

writers. Even though the peers’ feedback made a contribution, however, they seemed less

motivated to offer their comments if the teacher’s comments were provided simultaneously.

As for the writer, he or she may feel a need understand the concepts of correct language

usage in order to make judgments on the correctness of the peer responses. Berg (1999) stated

the following:

The students cannot just take the advice as given and make the change, as is likely
when the expert (i.e., teacher) provides feedback. Instead, the student will need to
consider the advice from a peer, question its validity, weigh it against his or her own
knowledge and ideas, and then make a decision about what, if any, changes to make.
(p. 232)

Berg thereby confirms the idea that the peer feedback improves ESL students’ writing

products and meanwhile encourages them to critique the reasoning behind the feedback so that

33
they can decide whether the content they have presented or their mode of expression is consistent

with the peer responses.

Other studies revealed different results with respect to peer review. Connor and

Asenavage (1994) studied eight students from different countries in an ESL freshman writing

class at a large Midwestern university. Their studies found that students revised their writing

products, but only a few revisions were from peer responses. Instead, a teacher’s feedback had

significant greater influence on students’ writing. The results indicated that 35 percent of

revisions came from the teachers, and 60 percent from others, e.g., tutors or other students. The

contradictory results of their study may be related to the fact that they offered participants a

greater number of options for receiving feedback. A possible explanation may be that students

prefer teacher comments to peer review because students do not have confidence in their peers’

language proficiency as well as their own ability to adequately assess peer feedback. Ultimately,

giving students the opportunity to offer their opinions to their peers is a way for students to

review their own abilities. Peer review is a process that requires students’ collaboration, social

skills, and proper language proficiency. In a sense, before asking students to give responses to an

essay, a teacher should show students how to appropriately respond to writing (Nystrand, 1984),

as well as provide models of constructive feedback to students’ writing in order to help students

determine appropriate learning goals and effective peer response strategies (Benesch, 1984).

Teachers need to teach unskilled students to pay attention to the general issues of their

writing when revising, as other skilled writers would do (Chenoweth, 1987). Stanly (1992)

gained positive results by coaching college ESL students for peer review through extensive

discussions of writing and peer response procedure. Fifteen students received seven hours of

preparation and offered more specific feedback than nineteen students who received only one

34
hour of training via demonstration. Stanly concluded that coaching students for peer review

increases the quality and quantity of peer review, and results in more involvement, more

effective writing communication, and a better understanding of the guidelines for revising drafts.

Nelson and Murphy (1993b) found out that low-proficiency students can successfully participate

in the peer review activity, and such activities also improve revision strategies. The authors

suggested that students should learn the proper social skills prior to peer review, and that

students should be equipped with specific writing skills to enable them give clear responses.

Studies by Caulk (1994) and Rollinson (2005) demonstrated that peer review is highly

accepted by students. They also indicated that the teacher’s role in giving advice is still highly

valued and could not be replaced. Other researchers (Freeman, 1987; Hillocks, 1986; Knoblauch

and Brannon, 1981; Krashen, 1984) have commented that, when students consistently receive

teachers’ comments on all drafts rather than only on the final essay, they are motivated to

improve their writing. , Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1994) reported that ESL students take an

interest in teachers’ feedback on content, and on the surface level of content and correction. One

reason that students preferred teachers’ comments might come from the concept of power

distance (Hofstede, 1984) as rooted in their cultural perspectives. Based on studies of students of

mixed nationalities in an advanced ESL class at an American university, Nelson and Carson

(1998) stated:

In educational settings, power distance includes the distance between a teacher and a
student. In countries with a large power distance, teachers are viewed as the holders
of truth, wisdom, and knowledge and they pass this knowledge on to their students.
Thus, ESL students from countries with a large power distance are perhaps less likely
to value their peers’ views than are students from countries with a lower power
distance (e.g., students from United States).” (p. 129)

Nelson and Murphy (1993a) discovered that Chinese-speaking students are less willing to

have their writing judged by nonnative speakers of English. Carson and Nelson (1994) also

35
found that Chinese-speaking students would like to maintain a harmonious relation with their

group members. Though the teachers’ feedback is largely viewed in a favorable light by students

in China, it would be hard to successfully implement peer review there because students are

generally unwilling to criticize other students. Criticism, in terms of Chinese culture, is viewed

as a way to embarrass someone in front of others.

Ferris (1995) conducted a study that examined students’ reactions to teacher responses in

multiple-draft composition classes. She investigated 155 students taking ESL writing classes at

California State University, Sacramento. The results indicated that students enjoy receiving

comments of encouragement, employ various strategies to respond to teachers’ comments, and

pay more attention to the comments on the preliminary drafts than on the final draft. Those

studies demonstrated that when students experience the process of revision, they are learning to

write. Tsui and Ng (2000) studied 27 EFL students in Grade 12 and 13 at a secondary school in

Hong Kong. They were engaged in a writing circle which included these activities:

brainstorming, drafting an outline, peer comments on the outline, revision of the outline, writing

a first draft, peer comments on the first draft, writing a second draft, teacher comments on the

second draft, writing a third draft, teacher comments on the third draft, and writing the final draft.

There were four cycles. Students’ responses to questionnaires, interviews, and the written

components of the 3rd and 4th cycles were adopted for data analysis. The results showed that,

though some learners accept both teacher comments and peer review, most students value

teacher feedback more than peer review. The reason for this preference is that they view teachers

as authority figures. Some students who incorporate a small percentage of peer comments into

their writing products view the teacher as the main source of authority, and they have little

confidence in peers who are not native speakers of English. The scholars also suggested, though,

36
that using peer review may help to develop learner autonomy since students reported that reading

other students’ work as they prepared to give feedback did have a good influence on their own

writing. Some scholars are concerned that the teacher’s attitude might be an obstacle in and of

itself to effective communication between the learner and the teacher. Purves (1986) considered

that writing teachers might not be sensitive enough to their students’ needs to provide helpful

and clear comments, and Brannon and Knoblauch (1982) considered that, instead of encouraging

students to embrace their open voices in their writing, writing teachers have a tendency to force

students to accept the teacher’s ideas. Hence, the students’ voices were gradually diminished

during the writing process. Furthermore, contradictions and controversies arose due to that

students not fully understanding the writing teacher’s agenda. This also could be viewed as a

political struggle between oppressed students and the teacher, the classroom authority.

In sum, students from some countries might have issues regarding power distance. Such

perceptions play an important role when students decide whether to place credence in comments

resulting from peer review, or only in comments provided by the teacher. Many peer review

studies conclude that the peer review activity is positive. By understanding culture influences on

student perception, we may develop a better understanding of how peer review might be

implemented in various countries around the globe.

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 CHAPTER THREE

Theoretical Framework

Concepts of sociocultural theory by Vygotskyans (Leont’ev, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986;

Wertsch, 1985, 1991) and the writing models of process theory proposed by Hayes and Flowers

(1980) and Hayes (1996) were adopted as the theoretical framework in this study. Also

incorporated into the framework in specific reference to L2 acquisition were the sociocultural

theories devised by Lantolf (2000) and Lantolf and Appel (1994).

Concepts of Sociocultural Theory

The concepts of sociocultural theory help provide an understanding of how individuals

develop higher cognition and the kinds of activities that support such changes. Wertsch (1995)

indicated that “the goal of [such] research is to understand the relationship between human

mental function, on the one hand, and cultural, historical and institutional setting, on the other”

(p.56), implying that there are various factors which produce new and flexible relationships in

regard to teachers’ instruction, students’ responses, and school legitimacy. In this study,

Vygotskian sociocultural theory provides a lens through which we might understand how

participants (both teachers and students) alter their internal cognitive activities and how they

respond to the external factors that influence their decision-making and progress in writing

(Vygotsky, 1978; Leont’ev, 1981).

Zone of Proximal Development

Whether learners make progress because of the facilitators’ instruction is worthy of

analysis. Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) stated that the term scaffolding in the education setting

refers to “a process that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve

a goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts” (p. 90). Pressley (2002) stated that the

38
“adult carefully monitors when enough instructional input has been provided to permit the child

to make progress toward an academic goal, and the adult provides support only when the child

needs it. If the child catches on quickly, the adult’s responsive instruction will be less detailed

than if the child experiences difficulty with the task” (pp. 97-98). This gamut of customized

instructional guidance that helps students make progress beyond their actual developmental level

is designated the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Vygotsky (1978) indicated that the ZPD

is “the difference between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem

solving and the level of potential development as determined by problem solving under adult

guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (p. 86). Hence, in educational settings,

learners need to be scaffolded to reach their learning potential.

Lantolf (2000) described that the ZPD as “not a physical place situated in time and space,

rather it is a metaphor for observing and understanding how meditational means are appropriated

and internalized” (p.17). With the support of the experts or cultural artifacts, learners may reach

their learning potential (Vygotsky, 1978; Lantolf, 2000), and in this process, meditational means

are employed to scaffold student learning. Johnson (2006) indicated that object-regulated means

represent the cultural artifacts from the learners’ environment, other-regulated means refer to the

help or artifacts from other people or cultures, and self-regulated means indicate that learners

themselves controlled their cognition and activity. Scaffolding can be used in L2 settings, though

L2 writers may feel challenged by exposure to new cultures, unfamiliar linguistic terms and

textural factors. Watts-Taffe and Truscott (2000) stressed the importance of vocabulary

development, by which students express their thinking and make connections with the texts.

Scaffolding the knowledge background of content (topic schema), language (linguistic schema),

and text structure and organization (text schema) is important for prewriting activities to help

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students associate the new information with what has been stored in their long-term memories

so that it can be applied in the new context, which may support L2 writers’ compositions and

production processes (Reves, 1993). When applying the scaffolding concept of ZPD in

educational settings, teachers may have to demonstrate flexibly in the guidance they provide and

offer different forms of support for different learners in order to help each reach his or her

greatest learning potential.

Internalization and Transformation

In Vygotsky’s view (1978), internalization is a foundation of learning processes, through

which learners negotiate the input from the external social activities by using their internal

controls. Leont’ev (1981) further explained that “the process of internalization is not the

transferal of an external activity to a preexisting internal ‘plane of consciousness’; it is the

process in which the plane is formed” (p. 57). When internalization takes place, a learner will

remodel, and the activities will restructure cognition. Such development is neither a linear nor a

fixed process, but rather a dialogic process of transformation between oneself and one’s activities.

It is not a replacement of knowledge or skills (Valsiner and van der Veer, 2002). Flowers and

Heyes (1981) indicated that writers’ knowledge of a topic, their sense of audience, and an

emphasis on the inventive and generative nature of the composing process could give writers

more ideas when they are writing. While writing has been viewed as an induced and internal

process, it also can be a discovery activity through which writers’ concerns subtly emerge.

Process Theory in Writing

Process theory has been applied to L2 instruction since the early 1980s, focusing on

showing students that the purpose of successful writing is not only to practice grammar, but also

40
to generate new ideas, organize ideas, draft and revise. Pattey-Chavez, Matsumura, and Valdes

(2004) stated:

Process approach to writing instruction emphasized a cycle of revision during which

students draft, edit, and revised their work. In this approach, feedback from teachers
or peers and the opportunity to revised written work based on this feedback are
considered to be keys to students’ development as writers and the role of instruction
in novice learning and the appropriation of writing has become a focal concern. (p.
462)

Perl (1980a; 1980b) found that unskilled writers have a tendency to be distracted from

generating ideas because they focus more on the surface level of writing. Both unskilled and

skilled writers, in fact, could discover their ideas in the process of composing. Similarly, Faigley

and Witte (1981) and Sommers (1980) demonstrated that revision helps proficient writers

integrate their ideas into writing. However, the activity of revision may not be as useful for less-

experienced writers. Zamel (1983) studied advanced ESL students who went through a formal

process of discovering and creating meaning, a key component of which was understanding the

factors that had an influence on writing. Participants were in an intermediate composition class,

and they had already completed two semesters of freshman composition. The findings revealed

that skilled ESL writers have greater ability in exploring and clarifying their ideas and that they

pay more attention to language-related concerns after their ideas have been outlined, while

unskilled writers often get distracted by grammatical issues and make few changes to their initial

ideas. Zamel (1985) investigated in particular the writing process of unskilled ESL learners.

College ESL students with a score in the range 54 to 80 on the Michigan Test of English

Language Proficiency, which tests grammar, vocabulary and reading, were placed in a

developmental composition class before they could take freshman composition. Students with a

score in the range 70 to 79 could take one-fourth to one-third of a normal academic load along

with an intensive ESL course of at least 10 hours per week, and students with scores between 80

41
and 84 could take one-half of a normal academic load plus a four-hour ESL course. It was

difficult to make generalizations based on this study, as each participant had different

performance and issues, but the two students with the highest English proficiency scores stated

that they did not continue to read or reread what they had written, while the rest of the ESL

students kept returning to review their sentences. This suggests that students with better ability

have confidence, in general, in the writing process even though they still were attending ESL

classes. Muncie (2003) stated that process writing is not a way to practice grammar; instead, it

involves how to generate ideas, organize structure, draft, and revise. Investigating whether a

process writing approach was helpful in improving the vocabulary of Japanese university

students, Muncie analyzed the first and final drafts of a compositions written through process

writing. There were no significant differences between the two drafts, but the revisions made

between first and last draft did show an increased use of more sophisticated vocabulary. He

assumed that process writing could be used to help students stretch their vocabulary. With a

particular emphasis on vocabulary in the pre-writing stage, process writing also may motivate

students to perform better.

The Flowers and Hayes Model of Writing

Process Theory has a focus on how learners are motivated and on how they plan their

ideas, organize paragraphs, and revise sentences. There is an additional focus on how the writing

task might influence the modifications a learner might make. Process Theory is rooted in the L1

writing model (Flowers and Hayes, 1981; Hayes, 1996) and then applied to the L2 writing

application (Silva, 1993; Zimmermann, 2000). In 1981, Flowers and Hayes formulated a model

of the writing process that stresses the inventive and generative nature of the composing process.

Their aim was to explain how writers can be inspired by their understanding of a topic, the

42
audience, and the writing purpose. The composing process was viewed as an abstracted and

internal process, a discovery activity within which writers subtly emphasize their concerns.

As illustrated in Figure One, their model consists of three main parts: the task

environment, the writer’s long-term memory, and the writing process. In this model, the writing

process involved constant modification of the interaction between the writer’s long term memory

and the task environment. At the beginning of composing, writers define the rhetorical problem

of the assignment, such as identifying the topic and audience, or the constraints of an assignment.

As the composing activity continues, writers encounter more challenges because “each word in

the growing text determines and limits the choices of what can come next” (1981, p. 371). Hence,

developing text will demand that a writer do more thinking and contribute more time to the

writing process.

Figure 3.1: The Flowers and Hayes Model of the Writing Process (1981)

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 In other words, in solving the rhetorical problem, writers basically retrieve stored

resources – knowledge –from long term memory. In addition to writing plans, this knowledge

can include things like the writer’s comprehension of the problem and an internal catalog of

outside resources, such as books or dictionaries, that might be available. As the authors state,

“Long term memory is a relative stable entity and has its own internal organization of

information” (p. 371). The challenge is determining exactly how writers can go about retrieving

useful knowledge in order to reorganize the information to meet the demands of the rhetorical

problem.

Planning involves generating ideas, organizing, and goal setting. The act of generating

ideas involves retrieving relevant developed information or fragmentary, unconnected, or

contradictory thoughts from long-term memory. If the writer cannot retrieve the proper

information from long-term memory to define the topic or the audience, the writer then is forced

to think creatively. The process of generating and organizing ideas gives writers direction to

generate further ideas, which leads to new and more complicated goals that can integrate content

and purpose.

The translating component of the writing process refers to “transcribing” or “writing.” It

requires writers to juggle written language so that concepts are organized into a complex network

of relationships in a written form.

Reviewing has two sub-processes: evaluating and revising. Reviewing is a subconscious

process during which writers read what they have written and make decisions to write more or

simply evaluate and/or revise. These processes lead to new cycles of planning and translating.

Hence, the reviewing process is a recurring action triggered by evaluation and revision, followed

by generating. This process characteristically interrupts any other process already underway. As

44
writers compose, they monitor their progress and writing process their judgments typically based

on individual goals and writing habits. In the words of Flowers and Hays, “The monitor

functions as a writing strategist which determines when the writer moves from one progress to

the next” (p. 374). In this this model, the sub-processes are interwoven with each other and

arouse a reciprocal influence to the revolving writing process. However, if a learner’s language

competency is inadequate for translating his or her thoughts or for revising written pieces, he or

she might feel frustrated in the process.

This model focuses on cognitive activities. It does not clearly address how the social

factors influence the composing process, and it provides no definitive explanation of how the

task environment and long-term memory actually interact with each other while working on a

task. To address these issues, Hayes in 1996 provided a new model of the writing process with

roots in the 1981 model.

The Updated Hayes Model of Writing

In 1996, Hayes proposed a revised model (Figure 3.2) which stresses the relationship

between the individual and the task itself. In addition, the new model takes into account how

environmental factors contribute to the process of writing. In this model, there are two major

components: the task environment and the individual. The task environment consists of the social

and physical environments. The individual component involves four distinct but related factors:

Motivation/Affect, Cognitive Processes, Working Memory, and Long-Term Memory.

45
 Figure 3.2. The Updated Hayes Model of the Writing Process (1996)

Following is a list of major differences between this new model (Hayes, 1996) and the

original (Flowers and Hayes, 1981):

46
(1) The Hayes model (1996) emphasizes working memory. Working memory plays a

central role in this model, and its job is not only to retrieve information from long-

term memory, but also to connect to the development of a writer’s motivation and

cognitive process.

(2) Working memory contains visual-spatial and linguistic representations. Because

photos, charts or graphs appear often in the various forms of writing, it is essential

that we have the ability to comprehend those visual or spatial features.

(3) Motivation and affection play a significant role in the writing process in this model.

Individual beliefs are associated with the short-term goals and maintain the long-term

predisposition in certain activities, while motivation may shape the individual’s

actions and can thereby result in fewer errors in the current environment.

(4) In this model, the categories of cognitive processes have been changed significantly.

Revision is replaced by text interpretation, in which the cognitive functions of

reading, listening and scanning graphics create internal representations based on

linguistic and graphic input. Planning is replaced by reflection, in which the cognitive

functions such as problem-solving, decision making and inferences are affected by

internal representation. Translation is replaced by text production, which utilizes

internal representation in the context of the task environment to produce written,

spoken, or graphic input.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

Method

This chapter introduces the design of the study by describing the school context, the history of the

English teaching materials, the participants, data collection procedure and data analysis procedures.

Setting

HD High School is a private, academic-oriented school established in 1997, located in a

northern city in Taiwan. Because it is a boarding school, students follow the regular day classes

by attending night classes from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. after dinner. These night classes provide an

opportunity for students to review their studies and prepare for the next day’s lessons. However, ,

the night class hours sometimes are also used as class make-up time or exam time as long as the

homeroom teacher, the instructor, and students all agree. The school currently has nearly 2100

students from 7th grade to 12th grade, and offers a curriculum focused on EFL education. For

example, the entire school listens to an English broadcast for 25 minutes two or three times per

week when there is no morning assembly. Hence, to simulate an English-only environment, in

2004 the school established a Foreign Language Center (FLC) on campus. This center is run by a

group of teachers, native speakers of English, who offer a mandatory Conversational English

class to students from 7th to 11th grades twice a week for 50 minutes.

Adoption of Curriculum Materials

Between 1997 and 2010 this school adopted a series of traditional textbooks that featured

two specific grammar foci in each essay lesson. This series contained six books which were

designed for six different proficiency levels, from low intermediate to advanced. Each semester,

students studied one book and so, before they graduated, they finished all six books. However,

since the English essays on the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) and the Department

Required Test (DRT) include various topics and vocabulary that often dealt with current issues in

48
society, in January, 2011, the English subject committee, composed exclusively of EFL

instructors, adopted a monthly print magazine along with an explanatory CD broadcast over the

school’s radio broadcast system for use instead of the traditional textbooks. The magazine was

designed specifically for students planning to take the GAST and DRT. The English subject

committee believed that this magazine, which covers extensive topics of interest to students,

would better serve the goal of equipping students with the proper knowledge for taking the

GSAT and DRT. Another advantage was that, along with instructive explanations offered by the

CD radio broadcast and the radio broadcast, students could listen and study the magazine essays

on their own when their classroom instructor was not nearby. Hence, at the beginning of each

month, the EFL committee decided which essays to teach, and the EFL instructors had to teach

only those essays in class. The rest of the essays were left to the students for individualized work.

When there were no assemblies and weekly exams in the morning, students listened to the CD as

it addressed the specific essay they were studying in EFL class. All students from 10th to 12th

grades studied the same topic in the magazine, and they all received the same midterm and final

exams. All HD High students from 10th to 12th grades also used a grammar book that was

published by the participant teacher, Mr. Liu, as their supplementary reference text. EFL

instructors had to teach two chapters of the grammar book before each midterm and final exam.

As mentioned, the school had changed textbooks in 2011with a view toward preparing

an exam-assimilated learning environment for students. However, the curriculum did not include

a mandated English writing requirement for EFL students to formally prepare students for the

writing section on the GSAT and DRT. Hence, there had been a silent agreement among the EFL

teachers who taught 12th grade that they must fill this void. Once in a while, those teachers would

assign their students an essay topic and set a deadline for submission as preparation for the tests.

49
When those teachers checked students’ essays and returned them, however, they would rarely

talk directly with students about writing unless the students came in for consultation with their

teachers on their own. The EFL teachers in 10th and 11th grades rarely asked their students to

write an essay because they did not perceive an urgent need with the exams being so far off.

Implementation of the Multiple-Draft Approach in the Curriculum

To implement the multiple-draft approach at HD High School, Mr. Liu and an EFL

researcher visited the school’s principal and administrators and presented evidence in support of

implementing a scaffolded writing approach in the 10th grade program. The approach was

approved, but under the condition that the school’s planned curriculum would never be

postponed or supplanted if there were any unexpected school activities which overlapped with

the writing project. In other words, the school activities would always be the priority. For that

reason, Mr. Liu had to use his ESL sessions and the students’ night classes to implement the

multiple-draft writing activities. Also, we visited the teachers of non-academic subjects such as

Physical Edcuation (PE), Computer Science, and Art, and they agreed to release students from

class sessions, if necessary, so that they could participate in interviews with the researchers.

Then we sent out consent forms to the 10th grade parents, informing them about this writing

approach. All parents agreed to let their children participate.

Teacher Participant and Researcher Participant

The teacher Mr. Liu, in his late forties, was an experienced EFL high school teacher. Mr.

Liu received his BA in English Literature from Taiwan Normal University, which is the highest-

ranked teacher education university in Taiwan. Mr. Liu came to teach at HD High when it was

established in 1997. Before that he taught in a cram school where he was in charge of the writing

department. The cram school specifically prepared its 1000 students for college entrance exams.

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During his time at the cram school, he hired over 30 EFL teachers to help check students’ essays

after a topic was assigned. Their job was to check the grammar and sentence structure, and then

give the essays back to students. The founder of the cram school was also the founder of HD

High School. In 1997, when HD High was founded, Mr. Liu was invited to teach EFL to students

from 10th grade to 12th grade. When approached about using a multiple-draft writing approach,

he agreed to work with the researcher daily from April to July.

The researcher, Ms. Hsu, had experience with teaching EFL to Taiwanese students from

7th to 12th grade, and she was very familiar with the materials that students in each grade were

learning. When implementing the multiple-draft writing approach in the 10th grade EFL class, the

researcher’s role was to observe entire class sessions, and then to discuss any observed

difficulties and challenges with Mr. Liu. She also was asked to provide advice and suggest

adjustments as might be appropriate. The researcher’s expectation was that students would be

able to express their ideas using basic English language skills and express their thoughts in

writing by using vocabulary learned in previous years. This approach was not designed to be a

challenge, but to help students draw information from their previous experience learning EFL

and apply it in their essay writing. Participants comprised 36 students who remained in Mr. Liu’s

10th grade classroom after a sudden reorganization of classes in the school that reduced his

teaching load at that level from 70 to 36 students.

Ms. Hsu had contacted Mr. Liu in late 2010 and received his consent to apply the

multiple-draft writing approach in his class of 40 students. However, when the researcher went to

the school in April 2011 she found that his 10th grade class comprised 71 students. The sudden

reduction in class size that semester occurred at the point when students had finished their first

multiple-draft essays, which of course resulted in only 36 of the original participants remaining.

51
Hence, the researcher had to regroup and conduct the first interview with those 36 students again.

This was necessary in order to make sure that both sets of interview data were coming from the

same participants so that, when we compared the interview data gathered in the beginning of the

writing implementation with the interview data gathered at the end of the implementation, we

would generate valid information. Twenty-eight newcomers from other classes also joined in the

rest of the writing activities, but they were not counted as participants because they had not taken

the first timed essay.

Procedure for Forming Groups of Student Participants

After the reorganization of the classes, only 36 original participants were left. The

researcher assigned these 36 student participants into five groups based on class standing as

determined by the students’ English grades from the previous semester. For example, the student

with the highest grade was put into Group 1, the student with next-highest was put into Group 2,

etc. After each group had been assigned one student, the process was repeated with the student

with the sixth-highest grade going to Group 1, the student with the seventh-highest grade to

Group 2, etc., until there were 5 groups of 7 students each. Students in Group 1, 2, 3, and 5

received group interviews. Group 4 was chosen randomly to be the focal group in which each

student received individual interviews. Of the 36 students, one student quit early because of

feeling too much pressure to finish all of the required drafts. Another student participated in all

activities and interviews, but she decided to not submit her final themed essay. Hence, this study

took 34 students’ essay scores into account as data, but interview data from 35 students were

included.

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Student Participants in General Groups (Groups 1, 2, 3, and 5)

Participants in Mr. Liu’s 10th grade English class were all Mandarin speakers who started

instruction in English when they were in the 5th grade. When they finished the 9th grade, they had

taken the Basic Competence Test (BCT), which determined admission to high school. Student

participants indicated that their English writing experience had started in junior high school (7th

through 9th grades), but during this period the required writing tasks consisted only of producing

simple sentences. When they first entered HD High School, they were asked only to choose

correct vocabulary words for the blanks in cloze sections of quizzes or exams. Also, their

midterms and finals utilized only multiple-choice questions.

Only a few students had had personal writing experiences outside the school curricula.

For example, in Group 2, Adam reported that, when he was in junior high school, his cram

school English teacher sometimes asked him to write an essay and, that after getting the teacher’s

comments, he had to rewrite the essay. However, he usually had no idea about what to put in his

essay. Another student, Jade, had a similar experience in the 6th grade. Her cram school teacher

gave her two assignments. One was to keep an English diary every day; the other was to write a

topic-assigned essay every week. Her teacher would make comments on those essays. Peter, in

Group 3, reported that his junior high school English teacher once asked him to write a letter to

an imaginary pen pal but did not give him comments on it. Jean, in Group 5, had an English tutor

for a short period after starting 10th grade at HD High. She was asked mainly to keep diaries

about her life at HD. After she completed her diary entries, her tutor would provide comments.

In this way Jean found out that she had difficulties with vocabulary, and she said that she had no

idea about what content to put in her writing. By the time we started our writing practice in

school, she was no longer receiving tutoring.

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Student Participants in the Focal Group

With the aim of bringing finer and deeper analysis of the effects of the implementation of

the multiple-draft writing approach on a specific group of students, the researcher looked in

greater detail at the 7 students in Group 4. Based on three individual interviews, the following

profiles of the Group 4 participants were created with consideration of how they rated their own

English proficiency compared to that of their classmates, and the extent to which they felt their

performance on the timed essay reflected their actual English proficiency, including writing

proficiency, gained from their previous English learning experience. Taken together, these

students’ profiles somewhat mirrored those of the rest of the class.

Student Participants’ Schedules at HD High School

At HD High School there were six to seven EFL class sessions per week for each grade

level, including Saturday. Each session lasted 50 minutes. Students stayed at school from Sunday

night to Friday afternoon. Every other week, they had to spend Friday night at school because

they had extra classes on Saturday. Every morning, they got up at 6:00 a.m., went jogging at 6:30

a.m., and had breakfast at 7:00 a.m. Then they returned to their classroom at 7:30 for a morning

assembly, an exam, or an English radio broadcast from the Magazine CD depending on what the

school had planned for the day. Their first class started at 8:10 a.m., and the last daytime class

finished at 6:00 p.m. Each student took required courses such as Mathematics, Mandarin,

Science, EFL, and Social Studies, and elective courses such as Computer, Art, and PE. Before

the night classes began at 7:30 p.m., students took showers and ate dinner. The night class

finished at 11:00 p.m. In each classroom, one staff or faculty member would supervise students.

Because many subject-area teachers gave students quizzes in the night classes as a way to engage

them in their studies, students had one or two short quizzes almost every night.

54
Student Participants’ Prior Personal Writing Experiences

As seen in Table 4.1, among the 35 student participants there were four who claimed that

their English proficiency was above the class average. Fourteen students considered themselves

average, and 17 students rated themselves below average. These individual self-ratings, which

had been submitted confidentially in writing to the teacher and researcher in order to avoid

disputes among group members, indicated that most of the students lacked confidence in their

English proficiency. Only 11.4 percent of students considered their English performance to be

above the class average, whereas 48.6 percent of students considered themselves to be below

average. The students in the latter category frequently indicated that they did not have sufficient

vocabulary in English and they lacked a clear understanding of English grammar.

Table 4.1. Participants’ Self-Reporting of Their English Proficiency

Above average Average Below Average

Number of Students 4 14 17
Percentage 11.4 % 40 % 48.6 %

In the randomly-selected focal group, by contrast, two students considered their

performance above average, four students considered themselves average, and only one student

considered himself below average.

Data Collection Procedures

The first step in applying the multiple-draft approach was that Mr. Liu demonstrated how

to compose an English essay to students. Also, to keep up with the mandated curriculum, the

researcher and Mr. Liu worked together to decide on the samples for his writing demonstration

and peer review demonstration so as to efficiently combine the school EFL curriculum and the

writing approach. They adopted the essay samples from the monthly English magazine described

earlier. When Mr. Liu introduced each writing sample, he would highlight such features as the

55
formatting of an English essay so that students had a better idea of separating paragraphs,

indenting the first sentence in each paragraph, capitalizing the first letter in the first word of

every sentence, or adding the correct punctuation. The researcher was his consultant and would

offer guidance for implementation of the drafts.

The data collection took place over a 13-week time period. In the preparation week, the

researcher and the teacher discussed how the multiple-draft writing approach should be

implemented in class, including when and how the teacher and the students would be

interviewed. Students completed Topic One of the multiple-draft approach during sessions 1

through 7 and completed Topic Two during sessions 8 through 13. In session 1, students first

wrote a timed essay as the pretest. Then the instructor used the rest of the class time to

demonstrate how to write an essay. In session 2, students received peer review training during

the class, and after the class the researcher started to interview individual students and the

teacher. In session 3, students sitting in the same row formed a group, and they shared their

findings in a class discussion. In session 4, students wrote Draft 1 in class and, if they were

unable to finish the draft during the class, they could finish at home and bring it back before

session 5. In session 5, students received peer review training. The teacher distributed an essay

sample to each student along with the “Peer Review Guideline Sheet,” which contained

comments that the teacher already had prepared regarding that essay sample. Then he led

students in a step-by-step review of the essay sample. When he finished, students exchanged

Draft 1 with the person sitting next to them and started to review their classmate’s first draft of

the first essay by using the guideline sheet. After this session, Mr. Liu hosted teacher-student

feedback discussion meetings with the five groups of participants in order to provide extra

support before students started to write their second drafts (Draft 2). In session 6, students

56
worked on Draft 2 based on input they had received in the teacher-student discussion meetings,

and they had to submit their essays at least one week before the next session so that Mr. Liu had

time to provide specific comments on their essays. When students submitted Draft 2, they also

submitted “decision sheets” in which they explained why they incorporated some of those

comments into their writing. In session 7, they had the whole class period to work on their final

drafts along with a new “decision sheet.” If they could not finish the final draft during the class,

they were allowed to submit it later.

Students followed these same procedures to complete Topic Two. Right before students

started on their Topic Two, however, the school administration changed the class size. After the

change, only 36 participants remained. Hence, the researcher reassigned the remaining 36

participants into groups according to their previous English grades, and she repeated the first

interview with students to ensure that the data collected from the three separate interviews held

with participants in each group would come from the same participants.

In addition, before session 11, when students worked on the second draft of Topic Two,

the writing activities had to be interrupted for two weeks because students were preparing for

final exams for all academic subjects. (See Table 4.2.) The reason this study could resume after

the final exams was that the summer session started immediately thereafter.

Scoring Procedure

Before this writing study began, the analytic scoring rubric (Appendix A) released by the

College Entrance Exam Center (CEEC) had been distributed to each student, and the teacher

gave a clear explanation of the five categories (content, organization, grammar and syntax,

vocabulary and spelling, format) and informed students that their essays would be rated by those

57
categories. Mr. Liu then proceeded to rate the students’ first two drafts on Topic One and Topic

Two on his own.

Draft 1 and Draft 2 of Topic One and Topic Two were rated by the EFL teacher, Mr. Liu.

The timed essays and both final essays for Topic One and Topic Two, were rated by two other

experienced high school English teachers. Both had years of experience assigning grades to

essay writing on GSAT and DRT simulation tests via the rubric released by CEEC (Appendix A).

However, to help assure that students’ essays were rated in a fair manner, the researcher asked

both raters to practice rating a number of essay samples in order to reach a basic understanding

of each other’s criteria when applying the rubric.

When the individual scores assigned by the two raters in any of first four categories

(content, organization, grammar and syntax, vocabulary and spelling) differed by two points,

each rater would share his or her rationale with the other rater, and together they would then

assign a final grade. However, because the total score for the fifth category (format) was only

two points, an inter-rater discussion ensued any time their respective scores differed by only 1

point.

Table 4.2. Data Collection Schedule

Activities Activities in class sessions Activities between sessions

Sessions
Preparation Researcher-teacher meeting
1 Timed writing: 25 minutes Researcher-teacher meeting
Timed Demonstrated how to write descriptive topics; took previous
essay exam topics as examples.
2 Whole class peer review training 1 (demonstrated how to 1)Researcher-teacher meeting
Topic One give responses to exemplary essay according to the guideline 2)1st interview with the teacher
sheet. Students practiced giving peer review to the same 3)1st interview with the students
essay)
3 Topic One: “A world without electricity.” 1)Researcher-teacher meeting
Group discussion 2)Student 1st interviews (continued)
Classroom discussion: Each group reported their discussion
results; the teacher answered students’ questions.
4 Students wrote Draft 1 in class/at home
Peer review training ( students practiced on an exemplary 1)Researcher-teacher meeting
5
essay) 2) Teacher-student discussion meeting

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 Students read each other’s Draft 1 and gave responses before Draft 2.
according to the “Peer Review Guideline Sheet.”
Students wrote Draft 2. 1) After receiving peer review and
participating in teacher-student
discussion meetings, students
6 submitted Draft 2 with “decision
sheet”.
2) The teacher offered comments on
Draft 2.
Students worked on their final essays in class and submitted
7 Researcher and teacher meeting
them with another decision sheet.
School reorganized 10th grade; only 36 original participants stayed in Liu’s class. The researcher reassigned 36
participants to 5 groups based on their overall English grades as released by HD High.
Topic Two: “Advertisement”
8 Group discussion 1) Researcher-teacher meeting
Topic Two 2) Repeated 1st interview with new
Classroom discussion
groups.
9 Students wrote Topic Two Draft 1 in class/at home.
10 Peer review training 1) Researcher-teacher meeting
Students read each other’s Topic Two Draft 1 and gave 2) Teacher-student discussion meeting
responses according to the “Peer Review Guideline hosted before Draft 2.
Sheet.”
Students’ final exam preparation. No writing implementation for 2 weeks.
Students wrote Topic Two Draft 2 1) After the teacher-student discussion
meeting, students submitted the Topic Two
11 Draft 2 with “decision sheet.”
2) Teacher offered comments on Topic
Two Draft 2
12 Students wrote their Topic Two final essays according to the 2nd student interview after they submitted
teacher’s comments and submitted their final essays with their final essays.
“decision sheet.”
13 Timed writing: 25 minutes. After timed essay,
Timed 1) Teacher 2nd interview.
essay 2) Students 3rd interview after timed essays.

Instruments and Data Sources

Timed essays. Students wrote timed essays twice, in the first session and the last session.

Students were given 25 minutes to complete an essay. Both timed essay topics (Appendix B)

were adopted from previous college admission exams in Taiwan. The first essay established a

student’s baseline writing ability, and the second timed essay was used to establish progress in

overall performance on five subcategories of the GSAT and DRT.

Multiple-draft writing essays. Students worked on two essays with the multiple-draft

writing approach. In the group discussions, a discussion question sheet (Appendix C) was

59
provided to help students share ideas on how to develop content, how to use language, how to

make a consistent development, and how to check for grammatical errors. Both writing topics

(Appendix D) were adopted from previous college admission exams in Taiwan. The teacher

rated Draft 1 and Draft 2 of Topic One and Topic Two. Final essays of Topic One and Topic

Two were rated by two other high school teachers who had experience rating essays. Both raters

assigned grades according to the rubric released by CEEC (Appendix A).

Peer review. Students received peer review training three times. The first such training

took place in session 2. The other two training sessions took place in sessions 5 and 10, just

before students started to provide input to their peers. Students then reviewed their peers’ Draft 1

according to the “Peer Review Guideline Sheet” (Appendix G).

Teacher’s comments. The teacher provided comments on Draft 1 and Draft 2 of Topic

One and Topic Two based on the descriptions of the categories in the rubric released by the

ECCE (Appendix A).

Decision sheets. Students submitted a reflective “Decision Sheet for Second Draft”

(Appendix H) along with their second drafts, and they submitted a “Decision Sheet for Final

Essay” (Appendix I) along with their final drafts. These “decision sheets” explained how the

students made decisions about adopting peer responses and teacher comments.

Interviews and transcription. All students took part in three semi-structured interviews

with the researcher (Appendix E). Focal Group participants had individual interviews, and

students in the other four groups had group interviews. All interviews were recorded and

transcribed. The researcher adopted the Grounded Theory Approach (Corbin and Strauss, 1990)

along with Thematic Analysis (Aronson, 1994) to code the interview transcriptions.

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 The first interview gathered information about the students’ general ideas of writing and

their perceptions of the timed essays. The purpose of second interview, which was conducted

after students completed Topic One and Topic Two, was to get an idea of students’ perceptions

of the multiple-draft writing approach. The third interview was to understand whether the

multiple-draft writing enhanced the students’ academic goals.

Student participants had a total of thirteen 50-minute writing sessions. Each group

participated in two teacher-student feedback discussion meetings. The teacher led the feedback

discussion meetings, either during the class session or outside the class session. Participants in

Group 4 were chosen randomly to be the focal participants, and these students participated in

one-on-one semi-structured interviews. Participants in Groups 1, 2, 3 and 5 took part in three

semi-structured group interviews outside the class session.

The EFL teacher participated in two semi-structured interviews (Appendix F). One of

these interviews focused on his experience with teaching writing, and this took place at the time

the multiple-draft writing sessions began. The other interview was at the end of the final session,

session 13, and it evaluated his application of the approach when he applied the multiple-draft

concept to discussion and writing exercises. This second interview also sought his perception of

the student’s writing development, on the whole, during the 3 months of the study.

Field notes. The researcher collected data from late April to mid-August, 2011. Field

notes were taken throughout the 13 writing sessions and during all meetings with the teacher.

Prior to collecting data, the researcher had set up meetings with the teacher, Mr. Liu, to build a

mutual understanding of how the multiple-draft writing approach should be implemented, and

we discussed how to develop the content of student essays and the students’ writing skills

through activities such as peer review and open discussion on an essay topic. In addition, by

61
providing comments to students, we expected students to be able to make connections to what

they previously had learned in English classes. The original plan was for teacher-researcher

feedback discussion meetings to be held before each session, however, in reality, because of the

instructor’s tight schedule, the researcher and the teacher had only small windows of time to

quickly discuss program issues immediately after each class session. The researcher took field

notes on those meetings. Similarly, field notes were taken during each session focusing on the

interaction between the students and the teacher.

Group and class discussions on multiple-draft writing. After assigning students an essay

topic, the teacher gave them a “Student Discussion Sheet” (Table 4.3) to guide them to share

information in discussions. Hereafter, students first brainstormed ideas in their assigned groups

and talked about how to organize essays. Since the “Student Discussion Sheet” had been

distributed to students on the day before the first writing class session, it was hoped that students

would be prepared to participate. Following the group discussions, the teacher led a discussion

among the entire class and encouraged students to ask questions and generate further ideas to

develop their individual essays.

Table 4.3. Group Discussion Questions for the Multiple-Draft Writing Approach Topics
Student discussion sheet (Topic One: A World Without Electricity)
1. Please talk about your experience when there is no electricity.
2. How does everyone react when there is no electricity?
3. What is the influence on our lives when there is no electricity?
4. What are the disadvantages when there is no electricity?
5. What are the benefits when there is no electricity?
6. How would you write your essay? And if you have any questions, please speak out and let your group
members help you.

Student discussion sheet (Topic Two: Advertisements)

1. Please talk about an advertisement or TV commercial that impressed you most.
2. What are the factors that caught your attention? Music? Theme? Characters? Or scene? Please describe
them.
3. How does this advertisement connect to your life experience?
4. What’s your reaction after watching this piece of advertising?
5. What do you think is the influence of an advertisement?
6. How would you write your essay? And if you have any questions, please ask and let your group
members help you.

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 To demonstrate how to write an essay, the teacher copied down written essays on the

blackboard and explained, step by step, how the essays were written and organized. Using this

demonstration as a guide, students were led through the process of writing a 150-word, two-

paragraph essay.

Teacher-student discussion meetings. The teacher asked students to submit their

questions regarding the teacher’s comments and regarding the peer review they had received one

day before the 30 to 40-minute discussion meeting so that the teacher could respond to students’

concerns more efficiently in the meeting. Each student could bring up additional questions in the

meetings, and the teacher would provide immediate feedback.

Peer review training. To prepare students to review other students’ work, Mr. Liu offered

peer review training. The procedures implemented in this training are listed in Table 4.4. First,

the teacher distributed a rated essay to students and explained how this essay had been reviewed.

Second, the teacher asked students to rate an unrated essay according to the “Peer Review

Guideline Sheet” (Table 4.5). The guideline sheet was designed according to the rubric released

by ECCE. Finally, the teacher demonstrated on the blackboard how he would review the essay.

Table 4.4. Procedures for Peer Review Training.

Steps for Peer Review Training (whole class demonstration)
Step 1: Distribute one model reviewed essay to students and explain how it was reviewed.
Step 2: Distribute the “Peer Review Guideline Sheet”
Step 3: Students work with their peers to comment on an unrated essay according to the “Peer
Review Guideline Sheet”.
Step 4: Demonstrate to students how they should review an essay on the blackboard.

Table 4. 5. Peer Review Guideline Sheet.

Peer Review Guideline Sheet
Draft written by ____________________ Review written by_____________________
Essay topic ________________
Your responsibility is to provide some honest feedback to your partner by answering the
following questions. You should offer some advice to help them to write better. Before you start
to answer the following questions, please read your partner’s essay CAREFULLY. Your advice
should be constructive and specific. Try to make it IN DETAIL!

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Content structure:
1. Please write down the gist or the focus that you perceive in this essay.
2. What do you like the MOST in the essay? List an interesting idea and explain why.
3. What do you like the LEAST in the essay? Please explain why.
4. What parts of the essay do you find confusing? Please use __________ to emphasize
those parts. Then explain why you think they are confusing and also make some
suggestions to improve them.
5. What parts of the essay should be developed more? Please use { } to emphasize them.
Explain why you think those parts should be developed more and make your specific
suggestions.

Surface structure:
1. Please circle all the spelling errors in red and offer the correct form.
2. Please check the grammar usage (tense, number, modality) in blue and provide the
correct forms.

Data Analysis and Procedures

The researcher adopted the Grounded Theory Approach (Corbin and Strauss, 1990) to

code the data thematically, and then carried out a descriptive analysis. The researcher also used

Thematic Analysis (Aronson, 1994) as part of the Grounded Theory Approach to code the data

into recurring expressions and categorize those into themes for descriptive analysis.

In order to answer the first research question about how a high school EFL writing

teacher can modify his or her teaching approach to enhance students’ writing with a focus on

linguistic usage and content development, the researcher considered data from the teacher’s first

and second interview transcripts that emphasized the teacher’s methods for improving students’

content and linguistic development.

To answer the second research question regarding how the teacher’s perception of a

multiple-draft approach to writing changed during the 13-session implementation period, the

researcher looked again at the data from the teacher’s interview transcripts, and then augmented

this information with data from the field notes from classroom observation and from the teacher-

64
researcher meetings.

The data used to answer the third research question regarding the specific changes

Taiwanese high school students showed between pretest and posttest on DRT and GSAT timed

essay topics in the area of content, organization, grammar/syntax, vocabulary/spelling, and format

awareness came from the students’ timed essays and final essays from Topic One and Topic Two.

Using the essay scores gathered in pre-test and post-test, the researcher used a paired-sample t

test. In addition, the researcher compared the essay scores from both timed essays, and the final

essays from Topic One and Topic Two, to provide a descriptive analysis of any changes.

The data used to analyze the fourth research question regarding how students’ experience

of writing multiple drafts influenced their response to peer review input, teacher-student feedback

discussion meetings, and the teacher’s comments were from (1) participants’ decision sheets, (2)

peer review responses, (3) the field notes from teacher-student feedback discussion meeting, (4)

field notes from teacher-student discussion meetings, and (5) the teacher and student interview

transcripts. In regard to the interview transcripts, the researcher was interested primarily in

discussions that focused on peer review and the teacher’s comments. Again, the Grounded Theory

Approach (Corbin and Strauss, 1990) was used to code the data. The researcher coded agreement

and contradictions between the teacher’s interview responses and those of the students. After

coding the commonalities and differences, the researcher analyzed them to determine the extent to

which the students and teacher developed successful communicative channels via those activities.

In addition, the researcher specifically reported on why each focal participant adopted or

discarded peer responses and the teacher’s comments, how they adjusted to the multiple-draft

approach and what challenges they encountered as they developed their content and linguistic

expertise.

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 CHAPTER FIVE

First Research Question

The first research question aimed at the teacher participant’s modification on students’

linguistic usage and content development.

The manner in which a teacher implements a writing program may deprive those students

with poor English proficiency of a meaningful learning experience. To remedy this situation, the

instructor must be certain to not only comment on the content of an essay and assign references,

but must also incorporate the scaffolding of students’ background knowledge. When Mr. Liu

implemented the multiple-draft approach, his past experience played a role in influencing his

decisions on what to offer to enrich a students’ linguistic capabilities and how to develop

meaningful content.

In regards to how Mr. Liu had developed his own writing skills in English, he reported

relying heavily on reading in the target language when he was a student. Hence, he believed that

a student needed to absorb as many topic-related essays as possible in order to gain the ability to

create a good piece of his or her own. Therefore, when he assigned an essay topic to students, he

would provide them with various topic-related articles in order to expand their understanding of

well-written prose. He viewed this approach as a way of motivating student writing. He

constantly encouraged students, regardless of their individual language levels, to read articles or

to look for more information to enrich the content of their essays.

Before we collaboratively applied the multiple-draft approach, Mr. Liu’s teaching

approach was consistent with his previous learning experience. He stated that he focused on

those students who had already demonstrated good proficiency in English because he believed

that only those students could educate themselves using the references that Mr. Liu assigned.

66
However, as Mr. Liu admitted, most of the time only the stronger students could follow his

advice. Though his approach aimed to help students scaffold their knowledge about a topic, the

truth was that many students lacked uptake due to an inability to absorb the scaffolding

information of this approach. In other words, Mr. Liu assigned a high priority to providing

reference information, but there was no guarantee that a student would benefit from this

information. When asked about how he scaffolds students’ content information, he stated that his

approach involved assigning them English essays to read. When we were talking about how he

guided his students through the writing process, he responded that “reading more essays” was

definitely key in his writing instruction. The following excerpt, which is from a discussion Mr.

Liu and I had prior to the implementation of the multiple-draft approach, reflects his long-

standing philosophy on teaching writing:

Excerpt One.

Hsu: But, sometimes, students just lack the direction needed for thinking critically.

Liu: It is easy to give students direction in writing. Give them an example [of an
essay to read] so that they can gain some ideas. But the ideal is that students
read a number of topic-related essays before writing in addition to this one
example.

The comments in Excerpt Two ensued after Mr. Liu had given a detailed explanation

about what students should do to write a better essay. He provided suggestions such as watching

the news in English; checking grammar books to study differences in usage; and reviewing the

characteristics of the noun, the verb, the adjective, and other parts of speech. His comments once

again reflected the philosophy that students should read ample topic-related essays to find their

own voice and check their grammar errors by using the grammar book so as to strengthen their

own impressions on correct usage. In short, students should be independent learners.

These ideas were expressed frequently in my interviews with Mr. Liu. Mr. Liu’s method

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of instruction worked well with students who demonstrated higher levels of English competency,

just as he had demonstrated when he was in high school. However, Mr. Liu also had a tolerant

yet encouraging attitude toward students’ academic performance realizing that not all students

were capable of implementing his approach successfully.

Excerpt Two.

Hsu: But those suggestions that you were talking about can only be implemented by
students with good English competency. Students with lower abilities have no
way to do it.

Liu: Yes, that’s true. For those students, we can only encourage them to do whatever
they are able to accomplish [based on the advice given to them by the teacher].

Hsu: How’s the level of this class [of student participants who are a part of the study]?

Liu: Only twenty percent of students have good English proficiency; no excellent
students.

Twenty percent translated to just 7 or 8 students who, by his own admission, could

benefit fully from his writing instruction. It also meant that nearly 30 students would feel lost

when writing their essays unless he altered his approach as we implemented the multiple-draft

writing approach in our study. Together we came up with several ideas by which students with

lower levels of English-language proficiency could become more engaged in the writing task

without running the risk that the more advanced students would become bored.

First, we would begin by having students collect a substantial amount of content

information before they write their first drafts for themed essays. Toward this end, Mr. Liu was

to host a discussion session on class content for all students, regardless of English proficiency

level. Small groups of students worked through a checklist in order to generate ideas for essay

content. They discussed their ideas in their native language, and afterwards each group leader

summarized their ideas for the whole class. By sharing information in their native language, the

68
entire class not only was involved in generating ideas as individuals contributing to a small

group project, but also in exploring a topic together as an entire class so that each student later

could conceive his or her own angle for using the information in his or her own essay.

Mr. Liu was willing to try the new approach as long as it could be merged, more or less,

with the materials that he already was using in his regular EFL class. His in-class demonstration

of the process of writing an essay consequently was based on an essay from the writing section

in the English magazine.

When we discussed how to best lead the discussion, we decided that – immediately after

each small group had gone through the checklist and the group leaders had reported their

findings – Mr. Liu would augment the discussion by providing his own perspectives. Just before

the group discussion for the initial themed essay topic was to take place, however, Mr. Liu asked

me to take his place as host of the group discussion. I walked on the stage and asked students to

think over a list of topic-related questions (see Appendix C). Mr. Liu then observed me

interacting with his students as I led the discussion in accordance with the model we had devised.

First, students in groups shared their stories with their peers in Mandarin. Later, when each group

shared their ideas with other groups, I made students pay attention to some ideas that were

appropriate to their Topic One essay (see Appendix D). At the end, I summarized the discussion

results, while also sharing my viewpoints with them. I focused on developing the content that

related to students’ experience. The information that students gathered from the whole class

discussion contained details of place, time, incident, event, people and more. I was hoping that

by this approach, Liu would set up an interactive atmosphere in his classroom. When Mr. Liu

subsequently led the discussion himself for the Topic Two essay, his approach basically was the

same as what I had demonstrated. Though Mr. Liu did not spend as much time relating his

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experiences and viewpoints to the students after they had finished their reports, I did appreciate

his change of style because in order to run a student-centered classroom, he had to give up his

habitual teacher-centered teaching style.

In those discussions, students were also asked to associate their life experiences with the

topic. In this way, students with various levels of English competency were all given an

equitable chance to collect their own content information. In this process, Mr. Liu’s role was

transformed from that of a reference consultant to serving as an information-collection facilitator.

The following excerpt from my second interview with Mr. Liu deals with his perceived role in

scaffolding students’ essay content in the multiple-draft approach.

Excerpt Three.

Hsu: Could you please talk about your role in each step of the multiple-draft approach.

Liu: In the beginning, we taught [in accordance with the peer review training].... So
my role was to conduct everything. When asking them to discuss a topic, I
became a host, providing opportunities for them to discuss, during which they
thought of many things and expressed themselves. My role was more like a
facilitator. But later, when giving them some guidance [by means of oral
comments provided during teacher-student discussion meetings and written
comments given on students’ essays], my role reverted to the more traditional
pattern of teacher-student interaction.

In the multiple-draft writing approach, Mr. Liu perceived that he was encouraging

students to brainstorm in order to identify their essay content, and we felt that the students were

relieved of a burden in that they were no longer required to read extra English-language essays or

check reference books. Instead, they gathered information in their native language, which made

students feel more at ease. Meanwhile, the inequality caused by the varying reading

comprehension levels among students was eliminated during the brainstorming activity. Mr. Liu

built a platform for students to communicate with their peers at this time. The communication

between him and the students took place later when he gave written comments on students’ first

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drafts, and also in conversations with the students in the teacher-student discussion meetings.

During these teacher-student discussion meetings, students worked on essay issues with

Mr. Liu face-to-face. This was an opportunity for the students to bring up questions regarding the

written comments on their first drafts. In addition to answering the students’ questions, Mr. Liu

continued to point out flaws in the essays and exchanged thoughts with students on content

development and linguistic errors found in their essays. His original teaching philosophy

manifested itself that he often told students to read more sample essays and check references. For

example, during the meetings he would tell a student, for example, “you don’t understand the

present tense; you should check the grammar book” or “we have talked about this usage many

times; you should spend time to help yourself understand it.” Even with the time he spent on first

drafts and in the teacher-student discussion meetings, Mr. Liu expressed doubts about whether

such an approach to writing would benefit all students or only the students who were more

proficient in English. In other words, he wondered if it might be in vain to engage in such a time-

consuming and effortful writing process in a class where the majority of students demonstrated

lower levels of English proficiency. However, he did not let these doubts interfere with the

completion of the teacher-student discussion meetings. After seeing that students made progress

in the teacher-student discussion meeting for the second themed essay topic, he became quite

motivated to provide more advice to students on content development along with advice on

dealing with grammatical errors. The proportion of his comments focusing on content

development and the organization of an essay increased accordingly. His initial reluctance might

have been due the fact that this type of mutual communicative discussion was not something he

had previously incorporated into his general strategy of teaching writing. Once he realized the

usefulness of those interactions, however, he gradually incorporated more of my suggestions.

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Even so, in our last meeting he said quite frankly that he remained uncertain whether he would

continue these activities in the future because the large class size and resulting time commitment

would always be major issues in his teaching environment.

The focus of the teacher’s comments had shifted from emphasizing vocabulary words and

phrases to assessing the logic of students’ essays, but the regular EFL class lectures did not

change much. Based on my classroom observations and conversations with Mr. Liu, I noticed

discrepancies between Mr. Liu’s class lectures, including the demonstration of how to write an

essay, and his own perceived perspective of providing comments on student essays. First, he felt

that he had been guiding students all along to pay attention to essay content and organization,

although this mentoring consisted primarily of advising students to read extensive topic-related

English essays. Second, when he guided students in how to appreciate the essay in the monthly

English magazine (textbook) in his regular EFL classes, he continued to explain vocabulary

usage rather than on the story development.

When Mr. Liu reviewed students’ first drafts of the first themed essay, he reviewed the

grammar and vocabulary while offering few constructive comments about essay development.

Comments about how students should organize their essays or how to develop descriptive

passages were rare. What appeared on the students’ first drafts was the corrected form of their

ill-formed writing and spelling errors.

In addition to advising students to read sample essays and refer to explanations in

grammar books about correct usage, Mr. Liu would also frequently ask students to memorize

vocabulary words and to consult vocabulary reference books that explained a term in context. He

believed that only when students could recognize the noun, verb, adjective and adverb forms of a

given word could they use the words correctly in their EFL assignments. Therefore, he often

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gave vocabulary quizzes that required students to decide which form of a word was needed in the

blank of a sentence. In addition, he emphasized the importance of reading articles because he felt

that, when reading, students would have a chance to review the vocabulary or grammatical

structures that they learned previously. He also believed that it was a stimulating learning

experience for students if they spent time making educated guesses as to the meaning of

previously unknown vocabulary items. He stressed the importance of the relationship between

reading and the development of vocabulary and grammatical skills, and he believed that the

examples provided in English-language articles were the best method for strengthening students’

comprehension. From our discussions and his interviews, it was clear that these beliefs were

well-intentioned and based in his own success as a student.

In the beginning, Mr. Liu would remind students that, when they wrote an essay using

only commonly-used vocabulary words, it might not be viewed favorably. He emphasized that

good essays would include variety in word choice and grammatical structure. In his EFL class

lectures, he therefore made an effort to explain the usage of vocabulary words and phrases. The

following scenario, using fictitious names for the students, illustrates the focus of his EFL

lectures.

Scenario:

Mr. Liu was leading students in a discussion about how to appreciate an English
essay. After he orally told students the meaning of the sentence “In addition to the
latest hits, this radio station plays the oldies.” He wrote it on the blackboard and had
the following conversation with students:

Liu: Students, you must remember that you only can add a noun or a participle
behind the phrase in addition. This is not the first time we have seen “in
addition.” We learned this phrase before. Does anyone remember what phrases
can replace “in addition”? (Students remain silent.)

Liu: What’s more, moreover...? (Some students show signs of remembering.)

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 John: Besides.

Lisa: Furthermore, also.

Liu: Good, Lisa, would you please come up and write down all those phrases on the
blackboard.

Liu: Everyone, remember those. (Then he moved on to the next sentence.)

In this representative example, Mr. Liu focused on a single phrase. He did not point out

to students that “radio station” was a singular noun and that, in present tense, the correct verb

form is “plays” instead of “play.” Students began studying the singular noun and present tense in

junior high school, so in this situation it would have been easy to draw upon the students’

background knowledge to expand the discussion to include singular versus plural and subject-

verb agreement. Expanding the discussion in this way would help shift the focus from

observation to students actually applying these language features.

As mentioned before, students’ midterm and final exams consisted of only multiple-

choice questions. The more vocabulary words and phrases the students could memorize, the

more likely they were to pick the right answer and achieve a good score on the exam. Toward

this end, Mr. Liu’s instruction had traditionally been exam-oriented with a primary focus on

building vocabulary. A second focus, as mentioned, had been on grammatical structure.

Concerned that Mr. Liu’s inclination would be to apply this same approach when

implementing the new writing approach, I tried from the outset to clarify that the approach we

were implementing involved scaffolding all students, not only those with good English

competency, so that each one might work to his or her individual potential. With that goal in

mind, I requested that Mr. Liu put students in a position to optimize their exam scores by using

class time to explain the essay rubric (Appendix A) that had been adopted by the DRT

(Department Required Test) and GSAT (General Scholastic Ability Test). Students learned early

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on that their essays would be scored according to the 5 categories in the rubric and, by reviewing

the rubric, they could understand that vocabulary only was assigned a value of just 4 points out

of a total score of 20 points. In addition, Mr. Liu stressed that the distribution of scores in the

five categories on the exam was defined in such a way that they could earn a good score in

English competency even if they expressed their ideas with simple grammar and common

vocabulary. This engagement, then, became the starting point for students in the multiple-draft

approach to writing.

An added bonus to this approach was that the participants would be alleviated the burden

of reading so many extra English-language articles. When implementing the multiple-draft

approach, Mr. Liu hosted topic discussions instead of assigning so many topic-related essays.

However, when students wrote their first drafts for the themed topics, Mr. Liu did provide

students with explanatory lists of topic-related vocabulary that he compiled based on the

discussions. We did not expect students to write perfect essays, but we hoped that even those

students with limited English-language competency would recognize that they could write

appropriately developed and understandable essays.

Despite our advance preparation, Mr. Liu found it difficult to abandon entirely his

traditional approach when commenting on the students’ first drafts of the first topic. Mr. Liu had

asked me, however, to help review the students’ drafts because he did not have enough time to

review them himself. This situation provided an opportunity for Mr. Liu to witness first-hand

how my approach to correcting essays differed from his, and it also gave both of us the chance to

remind ourselves of two things in particular. One was that the primary focus of our comments

needed to be mentoring in nature in order to help students develop ideas based on the text they

had written to that point. The other was that, unless students made serious errors, our plan was to

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not make changes to sentence structure or replace vocabulary items with words that might be

more appropriate in terms of precise and nuanced meaning. Mr. Liu and I consequently checked

the students’ sentences by applying rules of basic grammar and common vocabulary, and we

hoped that students as a result would find the writing experience less frustrating since this

approach, by definition, encourages them to draw upon their experiences over the entirety of the

time that they have been studying English.

To see if these hopes held up, the following writing drafts from three students with

different levels of language proficiency are discussed. In the comments made on these drafts we

see evidence that Mr. Liu was implementing the new approach to providing comments to

students, and we can assess how students made progress based on these comments between the

first and second drafts. The original comments were provided in Chinese, the students’ first

language, because the primary goal at this stage was for students to fully understand the

comments.

It should be noted that the students’ drafts in this study were handwritten, as were the

teacher’s comments. For the benefit of readers who do not know Chinese, I have translated the

comments into English with any words Mr. Liu wrote originally in English appearing here in

boldface. The essay samples below have been retyped word for word and in the same format as

the original, including all mistakes. The green represents the student’s original writing; the words

highlighted in light red are associated with comments in the right margin that originally were in

Chinese; and the material in deeper red – including the strikethrough of original student material

– represent changes that Mr. Liu suggested to the student’s text.

Example One is from a student, whom we shall call Ken, whose ability in English had

been assessed to be at the low intermediate level. This was his first draft of the topic “A world

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without electricity.”

Example One: Ken’s first draft on “A world without electricity.”

Readers will note that Mr. Liu accidentally put “use” instead of “us” in the sentence,

“Without electricity, it is very inconvenient for use to do anything.” This likely can be attributed

to the fact that, with so many student essays to read, he had to provide comments as quickly as

possible. This error was not detrimental to the effectiveness of the approach, though, because

even Ken knew what Mr. Liu meant, as evidenced by his use of “us” instead of “use” in the

version of that sentence that appeared in his second draft: “Without electricity, it is very

inconvenient for us to play computer games.”

Example One is representative of the early drafts that Mr. Liu marked without my direct

involvement. In addition to correcting a few word forms, he often told students to pay attention

to passive voice. However, he did not remind them that the basic form of passive voice is “ be +

Vpp.” He also told students frequently to strengthen the content of the first and second

paragraphs without giving any specific guidance on how to do so. Students consequently had to

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search for information on their own if they were to have a better idea about how to develop their

stories.

After I read Mr. Liu’s comments, I discussed with him how our goal was the individual

growth of each student participant at his or her individual level of ability. At that point we

decided that he and I would work together to check the first drafts of the remaining students as

well as on their subsequent drafts. Our focus was to be providing tips to students on how to

develop their stories.

Example Two also was written by Ken. In checking this second draft, Mr. Liu started to

provide more in the way of explanatory comments.

Example Two: Ken’s second draft on “A world without electricity.”

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 In Example Two, Ken added the comments about an electric fan and computers, and he

noted how they would not function if there were no electricity. At the same time, he noted that it

would be good for the environment if there were no electricity. With comments of this sort, the

student’s level of English proficiency was taken into account. Mr. Liu finished the students’

incomplete sentence by putting a focus at this stage on the usage of conjunctions such as because,

when, and if. For example, he extended the sentence “food will go bad” into “Food will go bad if

there is no refrigerator,” explaining that we cannot assume that readers will always understand a

writer’s logic. Hence, Ken had to provide more information in order to develop the essay more

fully. Mr. Liu also suggested that Ken should place more focus on exactly how people would

have a cleaner environment without electricity rather than emphasizing in both paragraphs the

concept that “life is inconvenient without electricity.” The comments that Mr. Liu offered on

Ken’s second draft did indeed consist of focused information. In this writing approach, another

goal was to help students realize their potential by only commenting on the student essays in an

encouraging way. In Example Three the student, whom we shall call Amy, wrote fewer than 40

words of English in her first draft, and in doing so she used the grammatical structures of her

native language, Mandarin. She seemed to lack an understanding of noun clauses because she

wrote “No electricity in our life that me are so scared” and “I think have no electricity, the world

would be confused and dangerous.” In accordance with the approach we had agreed to use when

providing feedback on essays, Mr. Liu did not ask Amy to consult topic-related articles or to

check grammar books. Instead he made note of her surface errors and encouraged her to extend

her essays based on the ideas she had brought up in her short sentences.

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Example Three: Amy’s first draft on “A world without electricity.”

Example Four is Amy’s second draft. In this draft she followed Mr. Liu’s suggestion and

extended her sentences. In checking Amy’s second draft, Mr. Liu commented on her usage of the

conjunction “if” and the verb phrase “protect….. from,” in her essay. Once again, he encouraged

Amy to think over the ambiguities that her writing had created. In this draft Mr. Liu overlooked

one spelling mistake, i.e., the use of the word “sacred” when Amy actually meant “scared.”

Also, he did not erase the word “from” following the word country, when he corrected Amy’s

original sentence. Even though omissions of this sort sometimes took place during the process of

checking essays, students still were able to draw on their stored knowledge of English and

produce correct sentences in the next draft. Amy, for example, correctly applied “So we can

protect our country and our environment from being polluted” and changed “sacred” into “scared”

in her final draft, just as Ken automatically used “us” instead of “use” in his sentence.

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Example Four: Amy’s second draft on “A world without electricity.”

Example Five was Amy’s final draft. She implemented most of Mr. Liu’s suggestions

about extending her essay. She adopted simple grammatical structure to deliver her ideas in

accordance with the advice Mr. Liu and I provided to the students at the outset: “whenever you

are not capable of formulating complex grammar structures, please use the basic grammatical

structures with which you are familiar.” Our encouragement seemed to be effective because Amy,

a student who English proficiency is low-intermediate, made tremendous progress in her final

drafts. She in fact wrote an elaborate essay though she made errors.

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Example Five: Amy’s final draft on “A world without electricity.”

Adopting a positive tone and offering student-centered comments was effective in

helping students to write. However, with Mr. Liu’s tight schedule, he could spare only a limited

amount of time for checking essays in this approach to writing. Even though he was able to

modify his way of providing comments when he and I worked together to check the student

essays, he again commented that he would not have been able to accomplish this goal without

my active involvement. In other words, in a setting such as that found at HD High School, it is

not practical to check each student’s essay as it is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task.

Example Six was the first draft written by a student we shall call Alice, whose English

proficiency was at the intermediate level.

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Example Six: Alice’s first draft on “A world without electricity.”

In Alice’s first draft, Mr. Liu reminded her to be conscious of the logic in her story. He

pointed out the confusing parts of the essay and warned Alice that there were redundant phrases

in her essay with statements such as“ no electronic appliances could be used when there was not

electricity.” In addition, he encouraged Alice to explain her ideas in detail and reminded her that

conjunctions such as “because” or “when” should be used to connect two complete sentences,

and that there needs to be a complete sentence following the conjunction “that.” Mr. Liu’s

comments were gradually becoming more and more elaborative.

Once again, however, errors arose in Mr. Liu’s corrections because of the time

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constraints under which he was forced to work when checking essays. For example, he wrote

“not” when it was supposed to be “no” in line 2. He also did not note correct usage of English

articles in that he failed to include the indefinite article ‘a’ before the phrase ‘few candles’ in line

3 and incorrectly included the definite article ‘the’ before the noun ‘life’ in line 4.

In Alice’s second draft, she followed Mr. Liu’s suggestions. She wrote two paragraphs

instead of one, and a new topic sentence in the second paragraph talks about no electricity

meaning no computer time and more family time. However, Mr. Liu reminded her that, except

for the topic sentence, her second paragraph was not much different from the first paragraph and

suggested that she develop her topic sentence by describing more about the good influence on

family relationships caused by no electricity. He also illustrated the difference between “a few”

and “few” with an equivalent comparison between “a little” and “little.” In her final draft, after

reviewing Mr. Liu’s comments, Alice expanded the topic sentence in the second paragraph. She

explained that she spent time on computer games but, when there was no electricity, she had no

choice but to spend time with her family. She also mentioned that this time together with her

family gave them the chance to give each other support at a difficult time. She still followed the

rules of Chinese grammar in some sentences, but she did follow the teacher’s advice step by step

to extend her essay. When students were given proper guidance that they could comprehend,

they made progress.

Those English basics that Mr. Liu put in his comments, such as how to use conjunctions

or how the basic noun clause is structured, had been taught to students when they were in 7th and

8th grades. Hence, Mr. Liu’s comments actually served to reinforce the student’s knowledge by

having them draw upon what they remembered from this earlier instruction. In this way it was

hoped that students would complete the writing task with less stress.

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Example Seven: Alice’s second draft on “A world without electricity.”

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Example Eight: Alice’s final draft on “A world without electricity.”

When we began the process of implementing the multiple-draft approach in writing, i.e.,

when I had initial conversations with Mr. Liu regarding the approach, he was not convinced that

it was preferable to his traditional approach of having students, as independent learners, focus on

vocabulary and grammar. He gradually saw the merits of the new approach but, given his own

tight schedule, knew that it would be impossible for a single teacher with such large classes to

provide comments that were detailed enough and individualized enough to address the students’

varying levels of English-language competency. On the other hand, Mr. Liu’s previous

experience clearly showed that students often would give up when comments were more general

and not geared to a student’s individual level of competency. The same students who didn’t

understand those comments often had neither the time nor the inclination to figure things out on

their own. The overall experience with the multiple-draft approach consequently raises a larger

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issue for which there is no immediate solution: In schools like HD High School, how can class

size and the teacher’s overall load in English classes be reduced in order to make it possible for a

teacher to implement this arguably more effective approach to the teaching of writing? In current

study, Mr. Liu’s faith in this student-centered writing approach had become stronger and

stronger and he tried so hard to listen to students and offer individual instruction. He saw

students’ growth in linguistic usage and content organization and he received positive feedback

from students receiving his student-centered approach. But unless he could receive extra support

from the school, he didn’t think he would have the energy and time to implement this writing

approach.

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 CHAPTER SIX

Second Research Question

The second research question investigated the factors that influenced teacher participant’s

perception of the multiple-draft approach changed over the three-month implementation period.

From the discussion in the previous chapter it is clear that the importance of an exam-

oriented curriculum was always in the back of Mr. Liu’s mind. Time constraints placed on

teachers also influenced Mr. Liu’s perception about whether it would be feasible at HD High

School to implement a new student-centered curriculum with teaching materials oriented toward

the needs of individual students. During the period of implementation, I spent lots of time in the

classroom as an observer. I witnessed how Mr. Liu struggled to make adjustments to his

traditional teaching strategies while at the same time fulfilling the school administration’s

requirement to provide students with content beyond their actual language proficiency as a

means toward achieving higher scores on the exams.

As an observer, I saw a teacher who was stressed for time and almost burned out. This

was a major reason that he asked me eventually to help check the students’ writing drafts. To

keep Mr. Liu abreast of the progress made by individual students, I gave him a verbal report

about my comments on each student essay after I had completed checking the drafts. Taking over

those responsibilities had not been my expectation, but sharing this responsibility led me to

better understand the difficulties Mr. Liu was facing. It also strengthened my ability to

understand the challenges faced by the students in this approach to writing. In the end, I was able

to see the bigger picture about why it is so difficult to merge writing into the EFL curriculum in a

typical school setting.

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 It was challenging for Mr. Liu, an experienced teacher, to adjust his teaching style. After

observing the interactions between him and his students, reviewing the design of his exam sheet,

interviewing students, and identifying the errors that students made in their drafts, I perceived

that a gap seemed to exist between Mr. Liu and his students. Therefore, my priority was to make

sure the teacher and students understood each others’ expectations in regard to meeting students’

needs as they delivered writing samples to the teacher. When the opportunity presented itself, I

passed on student comments to Mr. Liu.

It is important to note, however, that this communication between Mr. Liu and I was

reciprocal. I also saw value in some of his suggestions that were based on many years of

experience, and we incorporated these suggestions into the final model for the multiple-draft

approach to teaching writing. For example, one technique that Mr. Liu found was called “three

Ws and one H.” The three Ws stood for who, what, and where/when while H stood for how.

Whatever topic they were discussing, students were asked to think about who the people are

involved; what incident takes place, when and/or where the incident takes place; and how the

incident is handled. In order to better incorporate this technique into the multiple-draft writing

implementation, we selected essays in the magazine that were similar to our themed topics. Mr.

Liu then used the “three Ws and one H” approach to provide guidance to students when they

wrote their essays.

The first change in our model curriculum was that we focused on providing instruction

that was compensatory in nature. For example, the traditional focus on complex grammar

explanation was replaced by brief discussions each day on topics of basic grammar. The second

change was to focus on creating an interactive classroom. As a result, Mr. Liu made an effort to

switch from a teacher-centered approach to a student-centered approach, focusing thereby on

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classroom instruction that was specifically oriented to the lower-level students who had little

ability to solve problems on their own. These suggestions sometimes were not consistent with

Mr. Liu’s longstanding convictions about teaching methodology.

Mr. Liu believed, however, that a multiple-draft approach to writing would benefit his

students. His attitude at the outset was cooperative when it came to a desire to implement the

approach, but backsliding sometimes arose when he tried to put suggestions into practice. The

new approach turned out to be challenging for him both because of time constraints and because

the proposed methodology differed in many ways from what he was accustomed to. In the

following paragraphs I detailed Mr. Liu’s efforts.

As mentioned in Chapter Four, at Mr. Liu’s urging, the EFL teaching board approved the

adoption, as a textbook, of a monthly English learning magazine that was oriented towards

preparing for the college entrance exams. Each issue of the magazine included numerous

grammatical explanations, and Mr. Liu’s task was to help students gain an appreciation for

certain essays that the EFL teaching board had selected. Despite his efforts to discuss those

essays with students in detail, however, most students continued to make mistakes in their

writing assignments with basic English grammar, such as present tense, past tense, and future

tense, and they lacked a clear understanding of how to employ language concepts commonly

found in English essays, such as noun clauses and relative clauses. Therefore, I persuaded Mr.

Liu to focus on essential concepts when he introduced the magazine essays. My proposal to

introduce only certain grammatical points in order to assure that students have a solid foundation

in basic English grammar actually was the opposite of what Mr. Liu envisioned when the

magazine was adopted as a textbook. His plan had been to use the magazine to expose students

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to increasingly complex grammatical topics, which would benefit advanced students much more

than students with lower levels of English-language competency.

The following exchange is from my first interview with Mr. Liu, which took place

before we had begun to implement the multiple-draft approach.

Excerpt One:

Liu: The previous textbook had some flaws in integrating the grammar patterns. For
example, when we talked about nouns, students studied nouns, then pronouns,
and then things such as infinitives, modal verbs in each focused practice, but the
problem is that students won’t pay attention.
Hsu: But with the practices in those textbooks, students learned over 100 grammar
points with the 3-year curriculum. As to the magazine, since all the grammar
used in an essay was introduced at once, it does not draw any attention to any
specific grammar practice. Everything is mixed up.
Liu: It is not a big deal. It is teacher’s duty to remind students of certain grammar. For
example, when I saw something important in the magazine essay, I would
specifically ask students to check the grammar book. Using the grammar books,
I believe that students will learn more systematically while studying the essays
in the magazine.
Hsu: But it seems that your way of teaching loses the focus; everything is present in a
fractured manner.
Liu: Not exactly. If you provide the grammar, you must use the grammar book to help
students to integrate the knowledge.
Hsu: What I meant is that, based on my experience, using a systematic textbook along
with the grammar book can help students stay focused.
Liu: But from the perspective of teaching when using the textbooks, you need to
spend a lot of time to explain everything, and even though students listen to your
lecture, it doesn’t mean that they know how to apply things. Because those are
the grammar rules, and there is a big gap between learning the grammar and
knowing how to apply the grammar.

Noteworthy in this exchange would be Mr. Liu’s exam-oriented perspective and the fact

that the student’ limitations were not specifically considered in the process of adopting teaching

materials. The major focus was his desire to help students make more connections between one

grammatical topic and another as a way to broaden their points of view. Moreover, one of his

objectives in adopting this magazine as a textbook was to enable students to study, on their own,

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the detailed grammar explanations that the magazine provided. In turn, this would allow

classroom time to be spent on other activities. This is consistent with Mr. Liu’s basic concept of

the role of the teacher, i.e., that teachers at the senior high school level should focus on helping

students become independent learners. In other words, he felt that students, if they developed

autonomy in learning, could solve learning problems on their own and, in the process, strengthen

their own command of English grammar.

Another objective with Mr. Liu’s adoption of the magazine as a textbook was to improve

his students’ test scores by having students work with essays via activities that were specifically

exam-oriented. In each essay students would be exposed to a variety of grammatical features and

would not be limited to studying a single grammatical pattern at any given time. In the classroom,

Mr. Liu aimed to facilitate student comprehension of those grammatical patterns by selecting

certain overriding patterns and providing explanations about those patterns. When students

encountered something they were uncertain of, Mr. Liu expected students to spend time on their

own studying a grammar book. Asking students to study the grammar book independently was

not dependent on a student’s ability to understand the reference work. The idea was that students

of that age should accept that it is their responsibility to solve their academic problems on their

own, regardless of their level of competency in English.

Based on my observations and interviews, most students were confused about basic

English grammar usage. For example, some did not know the correct way to use conjunctions,

and others had trouble choosing the correct verb tense. When Mr. Liu spent time explaining

particular grammar rules that he considered useful, the lesson could easily go over the heads of

the students who needed to reinforce their knowledge of basic English grammar. The basics had

been taught in elementary school and junior high school, so there was arguably a greater need to

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review concepts that had been learned previously than to proceed with more advanced grammar

that often built upon this basic knowledge. In an effort to address both the students’ needs and

Mr. Liu’s expectation that students would become independent learners, I proposed to Mr. Liu

that he spend 10 minutes in class every morning providing students with a review of fundamental

rules of English.

Excerpt Two:

Liu: To clearly understand how to write clauses or use infinitives or participles, students
must -- [in my experience] -- write. By writing, they will learn how to write.
Hsu: But the truth emerging from their writing pieces indicates that those students have
no idea how a long sentence is constructed. They don’t understand why a a clause can
be a part of a long sentence.
Liu: At the beginning of last semester I spent four to five class sessions to teach this….
But it is not easy…. Those grammar points cannot be acquired in those sessions alone.
It takes time to master it. Sometimes you teach the same topic five to six times, and
they still forget.
Hsu: How about using ten minutes to elaborate one simple grammar point? We could ask
their homeroom teacher or your [student] teaching assistant to write the answer on the
blackboard. Students can check their answers on their own. When they actually work
on problems on their own, they make more sense.
Liu: Sure. As long as they practice, they will make progress.
Hsu: Let’s give them three to four sentences to write each day and ask them to first check
the grammatical accuracy of their sentences on their own before we review as a class.
Liu: This will be good. But it is still a heavy load for any teacher because you still have to
check their sentences. A teacher doesn’t have that much time. I have to teach 22 class
sessions [each week], give vocabulary quizzes, weekly tests, and many other things.
At this point I realized how difficult it would be for Mr. Liu to balance what he wanted to

offer to students against what the school curriculum required. After he said that he had no time to

create make-up material for students, I took on this task myself and, with his consent, created the

worksheets for him.(See Table 6.1 and 6.2.)

Table 6.1 and Table 6.2 are examples of 10-minute grammar review worksheets.

Grammar patterns were listed, and in each box students had to follow the pattern to produce (1) a

statement, (2) a negative statement, and (3) a question. All vocabulary and verb tenses were at

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the beginning level. Students had no problem retrieving the vocabulary and grammatical

constructions from their memories of earlier English classes.

Unfortunately, two obstacles manifested themselves in regard to implementing the 10-

minute grammar review practice.

One obstacle was Mr. Liu’s busy schedule. When I proposed the idea of the 10-minute

writing practice, he viewed the idea favorably. After I had created the worksheets, however, his

feedback was that he did not have the time to review students’ answers. I consequently also

assumed responsibility for checking the answers. When I finished checking the answers on each

worksheet, Mr. Liu quickly reviewed the students’ answers in order to gain insight on the

mistakes the students had made. Mr. Liu had good intentions in regard to using the worksheets to

help students overcome their difficulties, but the teaching load assigned by the school left him no

choice. He truly did not have the needed time available to involve himself to a greater extent

with the daily worksheets.

Table 6.1. Example of Ten-minute Grammar Review Worksheet

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Table 6.2. Example of ten-minute grammar review worksheet

The second obstacle was that, in order to not take time away from the regular EFL

classroom sessions, the students’ homeroom teacher agreed to provide 10 minutes for the

worksheet activity between 7:30 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. before the regular classes started. However,

there were only 6 times that we could actually use that period for worksheets because other

subject-area teachers often wanted to use homeroom time to hand out quizzes or to help students

prepare for midterms and final exams. Because the school administration had already established

the policy that academic coursework would take priority whenever there was a time conflict

between our writing program and the students’ academic studies, there usually was no room for

our 10-minute grammar review practice.

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 Even though Mr. Liu agreed that implementing the daily 10-minute reviews was a good

idea, his quick glance at my comments to students about the mistakes they had made did not

enable him to develop a clear sense of the help that students actually needed within the context

of our project’s overall mission. As a result, my efforts to help students better understand the

basics of English did not meet with the success that I had envisioned.

Although Mr. Liu tried to acquiesce to my request to guide students in applying basic

grammar when he checked student essays, he still preferred to give comprehensive grammar

explanations when he gave lectures in the regular EFL class sessions rather than limit his

presentation at first to specific basic topics. This reflected another area of conflict between

implementing the multiple-draft approach to writing and the teaching duties the school

administration expected him to fulfill when teaching English at the high school level. In other

words, the policies implemented by the school administration were a hindrance to meeting the

expressed needs of the students. In my first interview with students, many of them had asked for

help in reinforcing the basics, and the need for this focus was evident in the quality of their

written work.

As the implementation of the multi-draft writing approach progressed, I started to gain a

better sense of each individual student’s abilities in English both from my observation of the

classes and from the student drafts. Hence, I detected that students were confused about certain

aspects of writing in English. In the initial student interview most students reported that, in

preparing for the cloze sections on exams, they simply memorized the vocabulary. This enabled

them to fill in the blanks, which showed the first letter and the final letter in the missing word,

without actually understanding the sentence. The students also reported that they regarded the

multiple-choice sections on exams as little more than a guessing game. Since students were

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accustomed to guessing on these structured assignments, it was challenging for them to shift the

focus of their learning to creating sentences in free writing exercises.

In discussing the need for this shift in focus with Mr. Liu, I met with a challenge of my

own. The following conversation took place in my first interview with the teacher, before we

began implementation of the multiple draft approach. The specific topic being discussed was the

need for differentiated instruction to students with varying levels of proficiency in English.

Excerpt Three:

Liu: Students need to read more, listen more and write more, and follow a teacher’s
instructions. For example, if a student wants to write an essay regarding travel, he
won’t write a good essay if he doesn’t read essays [in English magazines or
newspapers] on a relevant topic. In a word, students need to consult authentic
material to enrich their essay content.
Hsu: But only students with better English ability can do that independently. How do you
deal with students with poor ability?
Liu: In this case, you have to do differential teaching. You have to teach them easier stuff.
Hsu: How do you do differential teaching in a big classroom?
Liu: It is about a teacher’s passion. A teacher’s passion along with students’ cooperation
can make for a beautiful job. If you ask a student to read and that student refuses, of
course, there is no way that student will perform well. For those students with poor
ability, it is difficult for them to compete with others but, at least, they must master
the basics. When they write, they will find some materials to read and write out some
basic stuff.

While Mr. Liu believed in consulting authentic materials to enhance wiring, he felt that

differentiated instruction could accommodate the needs of all students. His belief was that his

own passion for grammatical sophistication would “make for a beautiful job” by addressing the

needs of the more-able students while encouraging less-able students to meet their needs by

working on their own. Student cooperation was critical to his success as an instructor, and his

main method of providing extra help was to offer a list of reference books for students to study

on their own, with the choice of reference books, being differentiated based on the kind of

problems students were having.

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 Such statements were repeated in the conversations we had during the implementation

phase of the multiple-draft approach. The following interview excerpts are from two different

sources: Excerpt Four is from one of our teacher-researcher meetings, while Excerpt Five and

Excerpt Six are from my second interview with the teacher regarding the development of

student’s essay content.

Excerpt Four:

Hsu: May I ask what your focus would be in the teacher-students discussion meeting this
time?
Liu: If their content is not good enough, we must ask them to look for some references
such as internet, magazine or newspaper. Our students are not active in looking for
resources. They need the teacher to push them….

Excerpt Five:

Liu: Learning results depend on the students themselves. When you offer students [access
to] some references, if they actually go to read them or even check out more
information on their own, the outcome will be greatly different. This is what I call
“motivation.” With motivation, students look up information to create their ideas, and
those are the students with better learning outcomes.

Excerpt Six:

Liu: Peer review is a good approach because it offers students opportunities to think up
good sentences for an essay. If the content is not good, then students have to think of
ways to make it good. But as I mentioned, it takes time. The teachers have to give
more instruction or offer better reading materials. With this background knowledge,
students stand a better chance of writing good essays.

Noteworthy in these comments is Mr. Liu’s contention that students with lower levels of

English proficiency need to understand the basics. Given that only 20 percent of his students

performed at an adequate level in English, I suggested that the focus of instruction need to be on

the basics instead of grammatically complex sentences using various idiomatic expressions. As a

researcher, my bias was toward a more individualized approach to instruction as a way to help

students with lower levels of proficiency gain basic writing skills. I felt that this approach would

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result in less confusion and insecurity on the part of students. In particular, I stressed in my

conversations with Mr. Liu that we need to focus on topics that were the source of frequent

errors in the students’ drafts, such as basic verb tenses; the conjunctions when, but, because,

although, and so; simple sentences, and the use of relative pronouns. Students had studied these

topics since 7th grade, yet they continued to be the source of errors in their essays.

However, it also was Mr. Liu’s perspective that, in order to help students improve their

writing, our role as teachers needed to involve demonstrating how to turn a student’s draft into a

polished piece. When he checked the drafts for the first time, Mr. Liu consequently did not

actually differentiate feedback at first. Instead, he corrected all errors based on his own

perceptions of correctness and grammatical sophistication. This approach to checking student

essays required a lot of time and energy and, with marginal students whose writing consisted

primarily of disconnected sentence fragments because they had trouble recognizing basic

patterns of grammar, more information was provided than the students could possibly absorb.

In discussing the observation with Mr. Liu that this method of checking drafts benefits

only those students with strong aptitude in English, it became apparent that this was the approach

the school expected him to take as an instructor of English at the high school level. However, he

did agree to experiment for the duration of this study with an approach that simply corrected

spelling errors and retained the basic grammar structure that students were trying to adopt in

their sentences while also making suggestions about how to split the entirety of the material into

paragraphs. In other words, our role in this approach to writing was to make sure students could

correctly apply basic grammar in their drafts. Mr. Liu could identify one or two of a student’s

grammatical mistakes, and then he could make comments in the margin about using the

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grammatical concept correctly. The concepts also could be illustrated in example sentences.

Finally, Mr. Liu could provide one or two ideas about how students might expand their essays.

Even when Mr. Liu checked drafts after this without my direct involvement, he followed

these guidelines. As evident from Excerpts Four, Five, and Six, he continued to believe that his

traditional approach could achieve the desired results without the greater expenditure of time that

was required of the multiple-draft approach. At this point, however, it was clear to me that it was

not only teachers who were pressed for time at HD High School, but also that the students in this

boarding school had academic schedules that were taxing as those of their teachers. Even though

they might accept the validity of Mr. Liu’s advice, they could not always make enough time in

their schedules to look for additional resources and read them. Without the luxury of time, it was

impossible for students to develop enough background knowledge on a topic that was confusing

to them.

As mentioned before, it is difficult for a teacher to change his or her approach to teaching

after having developed an individual teaching style over the course of many years in the

classroom. Therefore, a bit of elaboration is in order to illustrate some of the specific challenges

Mr. Liu faced in implementing the multiple-draft approach to writing in this particular study.

First, our model for implementation stressed differentiated instruction with individualized

comments based on the student’s level of proficiency in English. For the most part however,

despite his initial buy-in, Mr. Liu continued to use the lecture format with which he was familiar

to demonstrate how to proceed with an essay topic. He spoke, and students listened. There was

little interaction between him and students, although students, if they needed to address their

questions, were invited to come to Mr. Liu or me after the discussion meetings. This situation

was less than ideal in terms of evaluating the students’ progress and uptake because we often

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were not able to determine if students actually had absorbed the material presented during the

class sessions.

Second, even when incorporating techniques like “three Ws and one H,” which have

merit in theory as noted above, there were hindrances to our ability to gain needed information

about student progress. Mr. Liu did ask students to ponder the W and H questions but, because

interaction between the teacher and individual students was limited, we often could not be

certain that this activity had provided students with workable ideas for their stories. The culprit

here, to a greater extent, was the lecture format with a large number of students that was the

norm at HD High School. In this situation, it is virtually impossible for a single instructor to

provide meaningful instruction that is consistent with the interactive model, regardless of how

sound the specific techniques might seem in theory.

In an attempt to address the lack of interaction dictated by the lecture situation, Mr. Liu

and I decided, during a teacher-researcher meeting session that preceded the class discussion on

the first themed topic, that we first would try to listen to the students when they shared ideas

about their stories in small groups, and then we would encourage them to put some of their

specific ideas into their essays. However, this plan fell by the wayside when Mr. Liu asked me to

lead the class discussion in his place. In retrospect it is clear that Mr. Liu did not feel ready to

lead the discussion, and he thought it would be beneficial to the overall project if he first spent

time in the role of observer. There is merit to this point of view, but at the same time this was yet

another hindrance to the teacher’s own development toward being able to implement the

multiple-draft writing approach more successfully.

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 Another aspect about Mr. Liu’s traditional approach to teaching was that most students, in

my observations, did not contribute actively to the class. The specific exchange in Excerpt Seven

took place after Mr. Liu had just finished creating a paragraph as a demonstration to the students.

Excerpt Seven:

Liu: Students, let’s read the following paragraph.

Students: [Students read the complete paragraph in nuisance.]
Liu: Any questions?

Once in a while, one or two students would ask questions. However, more often than not

the students remained silent, as was the case on this particular day. This situation, too, hindered

our ability to achieve the desired results.

Related to the situation just presented, I would mention a technique Mr. Liu employed

whenever students remained silent in order to move the class forward. He typically would call on

an individual student to read the sample paragraph aloud. For example, for this purpose he often

called on a student we shall call Grace. Grace would stand up and read the text. When she

finished reading one paragraph, Mr. Liu would ask her to sit down. Then, when Mr. Liu finished

another paragraph as part of his lecture, he called on Grace again to read the new paragraph.

Grace was usually the only student he interacted with in this way, so I once asked Mr. Liu why

he called only on Grace. He replied that Grace was interested in English and capable, and then he

gave me two other reasons for calling on Grace that reflected his deeper philosophy on teaching.

He mentioned that, when a student can do what he asks, he is delivering this message to the other

students: If this student can do it, you should be able to do it, too. In addition, Mr. Liu was very

mindful of not humiliating students in front of their peers if they could not deliver when called

upon. Mr. Liu’s deliberate intent was to maintain a pleasant atmosphere by not putting students

on the spot, which inadvertently deprived students of a voice in his class.

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 Lastly, in regard to specific issues that Mr. Liu deals with when trying to implement our

model, I will mention that it typically took more than 5 minutes for students to settle down after

the bell rang. The fact that Mr. Liu allowed this to happen was likewise a reflection of his

philosophy on how to maintain a pleasant atmosphere in the classroom. He told me that he was

sympathetic toward this behavior because he understood that some of his students did indeed

have difficulties in understanding the lesson content. As long as students did not disturb others

during the rest of the class, he was not going to quibble with them about their behavior during

the first five minutes. If he took a hard line with them for wasting 5 minutes of class time, his

relationship with the students was certain to deteriorate.

In the end, Mr. Liu told me again quite honestly that he likely could not continue

providing feedback in accordance with the multiple-draft model because he had so little time

available for this activity. Our exchange below in Excerpt Eight from our last interview

illustrated the point.

Excerpt Eight:

Liu: I think the results are not as good as you expected. A better situation would have
been that we both have time to review all those essays.
Hsu: That’s why I invited you to sit down together to review each essay.
Liu: But I really had no time to do that. I have so many things to do. In addition to my
teaching load, I have been asked to write something for the school library and,
meanwhile, I also am in charge of campus English events. I really had no time to do
that. In addition, I am really under pressure. So if you can make this approach as a
year-long program with only one themed topic per semester, I believe that the
outcome will be better [in terms of my being able to implement the model].

Of note in this exchange is Mr. Liu’s comment that the model might be workable if we

could work on only one topic for the entire semester – in other words, first draft, second draft

and final draft for the same topic. This limited approach would of course not be consistent with

the model, and Mr. Liu’s mention of this possibility again underscored that time, rather than

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pedagogical beliefs, was the major deterrent at HD High School to implementing the multiple-

draft approach on a permanent basis. Hence, one solution might be for the school to hire a part-

time “language assistant” to help in the English classes with classroom discussion and with

evaluating drafts of student essays.

Mr. Liu made adjustments to his teaching focus in the process. He switched his focus

from the grammar teaching to the organization and development of an essay in the teacher-

students discussion meetings that we hosted after students finished their first draft on Topic One

and Topic Two.

The goal of those meetings was to give general ideas about what we had observed from

students essays and meanwhile we answered students’ individual questions. The reason that I

used “we” was that I also helped to review students’ essays. Although I tried to maintain a role

as an observer role in those meetings, eventually I involved myself in some student meetings,

especially the first several meetings on the Topic One. In Mr. Liu’s opinion, a good essay should

contain complex syntax and advanced vocabulary. However, most of his students’ English

abilities were below average. Hence, when he was conducting the meeting in the beginning, even

though we had a discussion on what to emphasize, he had a preference to offering more

grammatical and syntax advices to the above average students in developing their essays. When

those individual students asked questions, he spent time on them, leaving other students in same

group with no clues about what was going on even though they were listening. Therefore, I had

to get involved to answer other students’ questions since I had reviewed all of their essays along

with Liu before those meetings. Most students needed the clarification on the teacher’s

comments that they received on their pieces because they were uncertain if they comprehended

those comments correctly. Those comments were not about advanced syntax or advanced

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vocabulary but some basic English grammar and suggestions on how they could extend their

essay content. When Mr. Liu and I reviewed students’ essays, we both noted that students got

confused on how to use that to develop a clause in one sentence; students had difficulties in

applying tenses; students were unsure about how to use infinitives or gerunds so as to how to use

conjunctions to connect two sentences. All above was actually the content that students had

studied in the first two years of their junior high school EFL curriculum. Hence, it was very clear

that students had problems in fundamental English knowledge. In addition, both Liu and I had

helped students to work on their EFL subject in college admission exams, we clearly knew those

components were very important in college admission exams. Hence, Liu and I would like to

make sure that students learned how to apply those basic grammar rules clearly. When seeing

Liu focused more on students with better abilities, I reminded him to switch his focus to help

those confused about the basics, which might enhance everyone’s progress. Gradually, Mr. Liu

became used to focusing on the comments that we had offered to students on the margin of their

essay sheets and the mistakes that students commonly made during the meetings.

While hosting those meetings, I once again realized that asking a teacher to modify his

focus was like asking him to remodel his teaching belief. It took time for a teacher to adjust

himself into the new demand. My request for Liu’s role in those teacher-student discussion

meetings was actually to force Liu to step out of his comfort zone. It was not an easy job but he

still took my advice. Though the changes he made were not dramatic and the time constraint

sometimes kept him from making modifications or left little room for him to satisfy students’

individual request, I could tell that he was trying to do his best to meet students’ needs and to

cooperate with me in many aspects as long as my goal aimed at bringing benefits to students. In

addition, I was glad that I was there to provide some help because it was a challenging task to

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host teacher-students discussion meetings in a large-size classroom even though each time we

only meet smaller groups of students.

In summary, it is important to note that Mr. Liu was willing to make changes to his

approach to teaching when we implemented the multiple-draft approach to writing, and he saw

merit in the approach that we were trying to accomplish. Even so, it was difficult for him to put

theory into practice and make changes in how the material was presented during the regular class

sessions. Mr. Liu was not accustomed to the level of interaction with individual students that is

required of the multiple-draft approach, and I may not have been able to explain specific

components to him clearly enough. In many ways, however, the teacher and researcher were

only minor contributors to the lack of success in our experiment in teaching writing. Factors that

arguably played a greater role were the size of the class, the additional contributions expected of

Mr. Liu at his school, the typical course load that students at the school were expected to

complete each semester, and the stress that was placed on both teachers and students due to their

time constraints.

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 CHAPTER SEVEN

Third Research Question

In order to answer the research question on the difference between the pretest and posttest

on DRT and GSAT timed topic after Taiwanese high school EFL students received multiple-

draft writing practice, in the area of content, organization, grammar/syntax, vocabulary/spelling

and format awareness, as scored by the rubric released by the College Admission Entrance

Center, I ran paired-samples T tests.

Between the pretest (Timed One essay) and post-test (Timed Two essay), students wrote

two essay topics in the multiple-draft approach. They wrote two drafts and a final essay for each

topic. Liu, the EFL teacher, checked students’ first and second draft and gave feedback. The final

drafts were evaluated by two raters, who assigned scores by using the standard rubric released by

College Entrance Exam Center (CEEC).

Both raters had been high school EFL teachers for over 15 years, and annually they

checked students’ writing essays in the college admission assimilation exam. In rating essays

produced in the current study, each of them assigned a grade to each category, and if the

difference between the grades was over 1 point in each category, they would exchange their

opinions and then assigned a final grade together. Hence, the final grade of each essay was

actually the average of two grades from raters. Students’ grades on the final draft of theme

essays (Theme 1& Theme 2) and Timed essays (Timed 1 and Time 2) are listed in Table 7.1.

One student in Group Two felt stressed and decided not to finish the final draft of the theme two

topic, hence no score was shown in that cell. Students’ total points on the pretest (Timed One)

and posttest (Timed Two) in each category are listed in Table 7.2 and the distribution of the

points that students earned in each category of the rubric is indicated by Table 7.3.

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Table 7.1. Student’s Grades on the Final Draft of Theme Essays (Theme 1 and Theme 2) and
Timed Essays (Timed 1 and Timed 2)

TABLE 7.2. Students’ Total Points on the Pretest (Timed 1) and Posttest (Timed 2) in Each
Category

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Table 7.3. The Distribution of the Points That Students Earned in Each Category of the Rubric
Released by College Entrance Exam Center (CEEC)

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 Table 7.2 indicates that students’ raw scores on the five categories of the posttest were

only a little higher than those on the pretest. The content category increased 6 points; the

Organization category increased 6.75 points; the Grammar & Syntax category increased 7.5

points; and the Spelling & Vocabulary category had the smallest change, which was higher than

the pretest by only 1.25 points. The Format category increased most, from 7.25 to 22.75 points.

The reason for the increasing grade in the format category might be that in writing their first

timed essay, students were still confused about the essay format. It was not that students didn’t

know that an English essay should be constructed with various paragraphs, or that they didn’t

know that they should indent a four-letter space before starting a new paragraph but that they had

no experience of applying the knowledge in writing their first timed essay. Not until they made

same mistakes in the theme topics or were corrected several times did they gradually get

accustomed to addressing the format category. As to the only slight change in the Spelling &

Vocabulary category, students stated that they had difficulties with spelling and finding the

proper vocabulary for their stories because their personal life and background knowledge had

little connection to the topic of Timed Two essay: Music plays an important part in my life. They

usually listened to different kinds of music without thinking about the influence or the changes

that music brought into their life. Hence, they felt that after many weeks of multiple-draft writing

practice, they seemed to understand more about essay writing than they were writing in the

Timed One essay but they were unable to demonstrate their growth while writing the Timed Two

essay.

In addition to the above descriptive data, paired-sample T-tests were run to examine for

statistically significant differences between timed tests one and two. Results are displayed in

Table 7.4.

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Table 7.4. Result of Paired-samples T Test on Students’ Total Points on the Pretest (Timed 1)
and Posttest (Timed 2)

Table 7.5. Results of Paired-sample T Test on Timed 1 and Time 2 on the Five Categories:
Content, Organization, Grammar/syntax, Vocabulary/spelling and Format

There was a significant mean difference (M = -1.000, SD = 2.488) in total points before

versus after the writing implementation, t(34) = -2.378, p = .023. On average, students scored 1

point higher after the writing implementation than before. Thus, students’ performance in terms

of total points after the writing implementation seemed to have significantly improved compared

to before the writing implementation. In order to explain the reasons supporting the significant

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difference between the scores of Timed 1essay and those of Timed 2 essay. I also ran t-tests on

the scores that students received on the five categories of the rubric as seen in Table 7.5. There

was a significant mean difference (M = -.443, SD = .470) in points for the format before versus

after the writing implementation, t(34) = -5.574, p < .001. On average, students scored .443

points higher after the writing implementation than before. There was a large effect of writing

implementation on students’ performance in terms of their points on format, d = .943. Thus,

there seemed to be a significant and meaningful improvement in students’ performance after the

writing implementation in terms of points for the format compared to before the writing

implementation.

There was no significant difference before and after writing implementation for content,

organization, grammar/syntax and vocabulary/spelling.

There was a small to no effect of writing implementation on students’ performance in

terms of their points on content, d = .271. Thus, there was small practical importance of the

difference in students’ performance in terms of their points for content before and after writing

implementation.

There was a small to no effect of writing implementation on students’ performance in

terms of their points on organization, d = .227. Thus, there was small practical importance of the

difference in students’ performance in terms of their points for organization before and after

writing implementation.

There was a small to no effect of writing implementation on students’ performance in

terms of their points on grammar/syntax, d = .240. Thus, there was small practical importance of

the difference in students’ performance in terms of their points for grammar/syntax before and

after writing implementation.

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 There was a small to no effect of writing implementation on students’ performance in

terms of their points on vocabulary/spelling, d =.061. Thus, there was little to no practical

importance of the difference in students’ performance in terms of their points on

vocabulary/spelling before and after writing implementation.

In response to students’ feedback on whether they made progress on the Timed Two

essay, the statistic is contradictory to students’ interview descriptions. Some students thought

that they had an increased understanding about writing when they wrote the Timed Two essay.

They felt that they made progress in the grammar/syntax category, which had always been their

main worry in writing sentences. Regardless, the test result did not show their growth. Perl’s

study (1980 a; 1980 b) reported that unskilled writers had a tendency to focus on the surface

level in writing. Participants in this study always worried about their usage of the English

grammar. They thought that when they were not good at English grammar, or vocabulary, they

couldn’t write. On one hand, their worries were not unreasonable because writing sentences

depends on English grammar and vocabulary. Also, students were never given the proper

opportunities to develop their understanding of the relationship between the letter sound and

letter identification as the students in the USA elementary schools. English learners in Taiwan

don’t have the opportunities to receive basic English language training, such as word etymology

and expression or learning the relationship between consonants and vowels. Usually after they

study English phonics for several class sessions, the teacher will directly ask students to

memorize the correct spelling of the English words in each lesson so that students’ learning

progress can be reflected in their written exams later. Hence, student participants focused on

their vocabulary and grammar in the current study and expected to make progress in those areas.

Unfortunately, student participants’ efforts on those multiple drafts didn’t reflect significant

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improvement on their timed writing even though they felt that they made progress. Muncie (2003)

stated that the application of process writing would not be a way to practice grammar but more, a

way for students to generate ideas. As a matter of fact, both Perl (1980 a; 1980 b) and Muncie

(2003) stated that students could make progress by constantly generating ideas, drafting and

revising in the writing process and eventually students would develop their overall writing

abilities through different writing practices even when growth on the surface level might not be

obvious in the beginning. After all, writing is a long journey and it takes time for students to see

their growth in writing.

Format category had nothing to do with students’ understanding of English, which was

why student participants scored better. The result of paired samples test showed that the factor

which determined students' progress in Timed Two essay was that students became more aware

of the writing format even though format was not a focus when students talked about their

growth in multiple-draft writing. The format category was the one in which they could score well

as long as they paid attention to the basic rules such as following the guideline to write two

paragraphs or remembering to indent four letters in a sentence-factors about which they were

reminded several times. Hence, they could achieve a statistical improvement in format awareness.

Some students noted that multiple draft writing practices helped them make progress on

organizing their essays. The improvement in the multiple-draft writing implementation didn’t

contribute much to their Timed Two Essay primarily due to the fact that they were not familiar

with the topic. McColly (1970) suggested that a valid writing topic should be able to filter

students’ prior knowledge. Tedick’s study (1990) also indicated the familiarity with the topic

made a difference in students’ writing. All the writing topics including Timed One, Timed Two,

Theme One and Theme Two were from previous DRT or GSAT official exams. Those topics

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were intended to come from students’ life experience. But since students in the current study

didn’t have the resonance on this topic, such topic might not properly reflect their growth in

those 13 weeks.

In addition, during the 13 multiple-draft implementation weeks, students regularly

received English lessons from the EFL class, which emphasized mainly grammar and vocabulary.

The most common tests that students received were the vocabulary tests. However, there was no

statistically significant difference in students’ scores for vocabulary/spelling categories between

the two timed essays. The explanation might be that most students had low English proficiency

and they had difficulties in following Mr. Liu’s instruction to comprehend their test materials. If

they actually worked on the parts that confused them, it would take away much of their personal

time when the reality was that they had a busy schedule and they still had to manage time to

study other subjects. Hence, only few students would follow Mr. Liu’s advice to spend extra time

on EFL subject. As a result, most students’ confusions were never resolved.

Mr. Liu worked assiduously to deliver language lessons to student participants. He

offered tests to make sure that students reviewed the content after class. In addition to the

comprehension exam which included multiple-choice, spelling vocabulary, applying

grammatical usages and writing sentences, there were two other kinds of vocabulary tests in Mr.

Liu’s classroom. One was that Mr. Liu spoke out the Chinese meaning of a word and students

would spell it out on a worksheet. Usually, students had no problem with this test. But they felt

challenged by the other test, which required their reading comprehension to fill English words

into the blanks in different sentences or paragraphs. Cummins (1976, 1979) discussed a

minimum threshold level of language proficiency and Clarke (1987, 1980) talked about a

linguistic ceiling. The ideas embedded in their concepts were that readers could only read

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effectively when they had developed some proficiency in the target language and the threshold

level would be different in tasks and in readers. Such linguistic limit was reflected in student

participants in the current study. Their comprehension was curbed due to so many unfamiliar

words in the text. Sometimes they understood most of the words but they could not construct the

meaning. They lacked sufficient vocabulary to support their reading, and they lacked the

knowledge of English syntactic arrangement of verb, noun, adjective and the like. Hence, even

though students constantly received drills of vocabulary while we were implementing the

multiple-draft writing approach, their efforts on constantly memorizing English words didn’t

contribute to their language proficiency or their essay writing. In 1966, Macnamara studied Irish

primary school children regarding the influence of using Irish as a medium to teach English. The

result was that students whose home language was English, but received English education via

the Irish language were 11 months behind compared to other Irish children taught by English.

Applying Macnamara’s research finding to the student participants in the current study, we may

conclude that using the first language to deliver the English language education might have

already lowered student participants’ learning pace. Since early 1980, Process Theory has been

applied to L2 instruction. It has emphasized that the purpose of successful writing is not only to

practice the language but also to generate new ideas, organize ideas, draft, and revise so that

students can benefit more. In Table 7.1, student participants’ final drafts on their theme topic

essays received higher scores, which indicated that the process of generating ideas, drafting and

revising supported student’s writing competence in a positive way. In implementing the

multiple-draft approach, those one-on-one teacher-student conferences, debates with the teacher

and the researcher and classroom discussions took a lot of time but were critical to motivating

some students and they didn’t give to their commitment on writing multiple drafts in addition to

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their regular academic studies. In a word, though most students in this study were not skilled

English learners, and their strategies for learning English and their writing confidence might

have been further developed by repeated focus on grammar and vocabulary. It was difficult for

them to shift to other learning foci, but when they were offered the opportunity to make progress

in writing, they tried and expected to see their own progress. If students can practice multiple-

draft writing constantly, they will make progress.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT

Fourth Research Question

The fourth research question asks how the students’ experience in writing multiple-draft

essays influenced how they felt about peer review, teacher-student discussion meetings, and the

teacher’s written comments about their work.

The Facts about Peer Review

In the whole class of 36 students only five students gave positive feedback during

interviews about the peer review process. They were Charlie and Jenny from Group Two, Lulu

from Group Five, and Eric and Tony from Group Four. Their individual performance on the two

timed essays and two multiple-draft-writing essays, Topic One and Topic Two, are shown in

Table 8.1.

Table 8.1. Writing Performance of Students Giving Positive Feedback on Peer Review
Essays Timed One Essay Topic One Topic Two Timed Two Essay
Student (Pretest) (Theme 1) (Theme 2) (Posttest)

Charlie (Group 2) 0.75 10.25 11 4.25

Jenny (Group 2) 9 13.25 11.5 7.5

Tony (Group 4) 0 7.25 11 5.75

Eric (Group 4) 6 11.5 8.75 8.75

Lulu (Group 5) 6.5 9.5 10.25 4.75

Class average 5.06 11.10 9.48 6.06

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 On Timed One Essay, Charlie and Tony scored less than 1 point while the other three

scored above the class average of 5.06 points. But on Topic Two, Charlie scored higher than the

class average (9.48 points) by 1.52 points. On Timed Two Essay Charlie scored 4.25 and Tony

scored 5.75, which was an improvement over their scores on Timed One Essay. Jenny was the

only student who consistently scored above average. Eric scored lower than the average only on

Theme Topic Two, and Lulu’s performance on Topic One and on Timed Two Essay was above

average. By examining their perspectives on peer review, we may understand the specific aspects

of the peer review process that these students thought were helpful in learning to write.

In examining the comments from these five students, even though they said they valued

input from their peers, they also stated that their peers made mistakes when providing comments.

Because they felt uncertain, they would double-check those reviews themselves to make sure that

the advice they were given by their peers was correct. In other words, they were skeptical about

the correctness of the peer’s comments. They wanted to incorporate the suggestions from their

peers, but at the same time they had little faith in their peer’s ability to make appropriate

comments about their writing. What compounded these five students’ skepticism more, however,

was that they were unsure whether they themselves had the competency to determine the

correctness of the suggestions made by their peers.

Example One below shows the peer review that Tony received on his draft essay on the

topic “A World Without Electricity.” This same information is presented twice. The first version

is an image of the actual handwritten draft with red marks added by his peer reviewer. The

second version is a retyped version of the text, which is provided for the sake of readability.

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Example One: Peer Review of Tony’s Essay Draft – Actual Image

Example One: Peer Review of Tony’s Essay Draft – Retyped Version

Even though Tony gave positive feedback to the researcher and teacher about the

corrections suggested by his peer reviewer, he said that he went back afterwards and checked

those corrections to make sure they were in fact correct. Example Two is the peer review that

Charlie received on his draft of the same essay on “A World Without Electricity.”

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Example Two: Peer Review of Charlie’s Essay Draft --Actual Image

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Example Two: Peer Review of Charlie’s Essay Draft –Retyped Version

Peer Review

Essay topic: A world without electricity (feedback translated from Mandarin)

Author: Charlie (pseudonyms) Reviewer: Danny Huang

1 The author talked about the experience and influence of no electricity.

2 it will be very troublesome. I think the author used the world” troublesome” appropriately.

3 will date and a lot of culture true does not exist. The sentence didn’t point out who could
not go on a date and it missed a subject. I don’t understand what “culture” is.
4 Same as above No.3

5 The whole essay doesn’t carry much content but some vocabulary was used in a good way.
ex. troublesome.
The author might continue to expand the idea about no dates when there is no electricity.
The author may point out things cannot be done such as going to a movie or shopping and
etc.
Charlie’s peer reviewer did not focus on the surface-level mistakes and rarely corrected

mistakes in the sentences. However, his reviewer did follow the guidance sheet and asked

Charlie to explain why people could not have dates when there was a blackout. He also reminded

Charlie that he missed a subject in the last sentence, “ … will date and a lot of culture true does

not exist.” The reviewer also asked for the meaning of “culture true.” Finally, the reviewer

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recommended that Charlie make connections between blackouts and dating, such as experiencing

a blackout in the movie theater during a date or while shopping with his date at a mall. The

reviewer might not have corrected all the errors, but he did provide his opinions on Charlie’s

draft. Charlie considered the review from his peer helpful.

As participants in this research project, both Tony and Charlie served as peer reviewers

for other students in addition to receiving input from students serving as peer reviewers for them.

Tony and Charlie, however, had vastly different perceptions of the effectiveness of the peer

review demonstration offered by Mr. Liu. Tony was able to follow his teacher’s presentation and

found it to be helpful. Charlie, however, indicated that he had difficulty understanding Mr. Liu’s

lecture. Unlike Tony, Charlie consequently did not fully follow Mr. Liu’s instructions and

instead used his own approach to provide comments to his peer. However, both Charlie and

Tony indicated that reviewing other students’ essays was beneficial, particularly because it

provided them with an opportunity to imitate. What they meant by “imitate” was that, when they

reviewed others’ essays, they viewed it a chance to borrow content ideas or grammatical patterns

from their peers. For example, when they identified a sentence with a particular grammatical

pattern that they found effective, they were able to create a similar sentence of their own based

on that grammatical pattern and use it in their own essays. Finding model sentences worthy

emulating in their peer’s essay was the main reason that they considered reviewing other’s essays

beneficial to their own writing.

Eric, in the same group as Tony, was the other student in Group 4 who gave positive

feedback on the peer review that he had received. He indicated that the peer review process

reminded him that he needed to do several things, in particular to his own writing format:

organize the material into distinct paragraphs, use varied vocabulary, and leave a blank line

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before starting a new paragraph. He also stated that his reviewer helped with his spelling. When

checking the peer review that he received on his draft as seen in Example Three, we found that

his reviewer changed the auxiliary verb “will” to “can,” and corrected the spelling of the

adjective “inconvenient.” The reviewer also addressed two instances of the preposition “to,” and

he replaced the noun “world” with “environment.” Unfortunately, most of the changes made by

the reviewer are either incorrect or unnecessary. In Eric’s essay, there was nothing wrong with

using “will” in line 6, and following the “if” clause “will” actually seems more appropriate than

“can.” Furthermore, there was nothing wrong with the word “world” in line 7 and in line 9 the

preposition “to” works just as well as “for.” As was the case with Charlie, the peer review that

Eric received did not really focus on grammar and spelling. Most of the written comments they

had received dealt more with how to develop the story.

Example Three: Peer Review of Eric’s Essay Draft –Actual Image

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125
Example Three: Peer Review of Eric’s Essay Draft-Retyped Version

Peer review
Essay topic: The world without electricity.

Author: Eric Reviewer: Jessie

Content and organization~

1 Make an example based on reverse thinking. It is Ok.
2 Add “ ’ ” to the word “ don’t” or you can write “do not.”
3 Make clear separate paragraphs.
Leave a blank line between the first paragraph and the second paragraph.
4 Try not to use the same vocabulary.
Use other better vocabulary.
5 No need to add “to” after the word “protect.”
&
leave ….to sb (“ sb” refers to somebody ). Use the preposition “for.”
According to Eric, the teacher’s demonstration on how to review essays caught his

attention in terms of checking grammar, and he first applied the information that was presented

to his own essays as they were being written. When he finished his essays, he then would use

teacher’s guidelines to review his own essays. He looked especially at the tense of his verbs. He

claimed that he had studied those tenses and usages for years, so he was able to apply his own

knowledge to this particular aspect of his writing. However, when it came to reviewing other

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people’s essays, he found he could not provide comments in accordance with the teacher’s

guidelines but that he instead had to do it in his own way.

Jenny, who was a student in Group 2 along with Charlie, indicated that her peer pointed

out her incompetence and reinforced her own impressions about some specific mistakes. This

served as reminder to her to not to make the same mistakes again. Example Four is the draft that

Jenny wrote that was given to a peer for review, but the reader will note that the reviewer wrote

nothing on the draft itself.

Jenny’s reviewer followed the class’s Peer Review Guidelines (Appendix G). Her

reviewer asked Jenny to give a clear accounting of specific instances when there was no

electricity. Her reviewer also commented that the last paragraph seemed weird, and that the

grammar was not correct. At the end, the reviewer suggested that Jenny adopt words that she

knew how to use in order to help with the flow of the story. Though her reviewer did not provide

practical advice, Jenny claimed that the review was helpful. In addition, Jenny pointed out that

the teacher’s demonstration on how to review essays provided guidelines for her to review other

students’ essays, but when asked how she applied the guidelines she could not offer any specific

examples. She could respond only that she just knew that it was helpful.

Example Four: Peer Review of Jenny’s Essay Draft--Actual Image

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Example Four: Peer Review of Jenny’s Essay Draft -- Retyped Version

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Peer Review
Essay topic: A world without electricity.
Author: Jenny Reviewer: Chen
1 The gist is clear. The beginning part draws attention.
2 The second paragraph clearly points out the situation when there is no electricity.
3 I don’t know what “will all can’t work” means.
4 The last paragraph is weird. Grammar is not right.
5 If there are words that you don’t know, try to replace them with other words that carry the
similar meaning so that it will help with the development of the essay.

Example Five is the peer review that Lulu, the student from Group 5, received on her first

draft. She said that it was true that some of the feedback from her peer was wrong, but some was

valuable. In fact, most of the reviewer’s feedback on matters of English grammar and vocabulary

turned out to be correct.

Example Five: Peer Review of Lulu’s Essay Draft--Actual Image

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Example Five: Peer Review of Lulu’s Essay Draft—Retyped version

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Peer Review
Essay topic: A world without electricity.
Author: Lulu Reviewer: Zhen
Content and organization
1 The influence results from no electricity.
2 We can’t see anything in the dark , when sky are dark, or in the night. Clearly point out the
influence during the daytime and night time when there is no electricity.
3
4 “it will be hot in the summer, if no refrigerator…..The sentence is not complete.
5 The first and second paragraphs can talk more specifically about the influence resulting
from no electricity.
One thing that is noteworthy in regard to Lulu’s essay is that the reviewer gave positive

feedback on the sentence “we can’t see anything, when sky are dark, or in the night.” The reason

for the positive feedback was that this sentence pointed out the outcome of a world without

electricity, day or night. Another thing is noteworthy is that her reviewer commented that the

sentence “it will be hot in the summer, if no refrigerator, food will be easy spoilt” was not

grammatically correct. The reviewer, however, was not able to provide any specific correction

for this sentence.

To Lulu, the teacher’s demonstration on how to do the peer review was just like any other

lecture in the regular EFL classroom, and she usually had no idea whether she actually

comprehended the lecture or not. She only knew she was confused about many things but she

didn’t know which specific parts that she was actually confused about. Hence, as a reviewer

herself, Lulu would provide comments to her peers in her own way based on her own knowledge,

which meant that she might provide incorrect information that she thought correct when

reviewing other’s essays.

The comments all five of these students made about peer review had several common

patterns. One was that, when they reviewed others’ essays, they gave their perspectives on how

the story should be expanded by pointing to a certain sentence as a starting point, and they

expected their peers to consider this input even when they knew clearly that correcting the

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spelling or grammar was beyond their capabilities. Another was that the five students, when

having their own essays reviewed by a peer, did not have much confidence that their peers had

sufficient knowledge to detect their grammatical and spelling mistakes, but they placed more

confidence in their peers’ descriptive written comments about how they might expand their

essays. This points to the importance of content rather than form in terms of feedback that is

perceived as helpful. These students also indicated that whether or not fellow students had good

competency in English had nothing to do with their ability to express their own opinions. If they

were unable to apply the strategies outlined by Mr. Liu in his peer review demonstration session,

the students expressed their opinions and made suggestions in their own ways.

Although these five students had indicated that they regarded the peer review process in a

positive manner, the truth was that their opinions vacillated between positive and negative. Their

negative comments were not much different from those made by the majority of the class who

considered peer review useless. When asked to provide more details, their negative reasons fell

into three broad categories: issues of faith, self-doubt, and lack of personal interest.

The crucial truth was that all students lacked confidence not only in their peers but also in

themselves. They indicated that they and their peers lacked a basic understanding of English

grammar. For example, they often got confused about when to use a particular verb tense even

though they had been exposed to English grammar instruction almost every day since they were

in elementary school. However, when reading an essay, they often could not determine the tense

and could focus only on deducing the meaning of the essay by looking into the meaning of the

vocabulary that they recognized. When reviewing other students’ essays, they consequently

wondered if they could make the appropriate grammatical and spelling corrections. When

receiving feedback from their classmates, they likewise were not sure whether the feedback was

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correct. They therefore investigated the peers’ corrections based on their own comprehension of

the rules of English. What frustrated them more than anything else in the entire process was that

they could not be certain they had sufficient ability themselves to make the correct assessment

about their peers’ input. As a result, they did not believe peer review was a viable way for them

to build their own writing skills.

For most students in the study, peer review contributed little if anything to their essays.

Some students said they had received encouragement from their peers even when there was

nothing particularly good about their ideas or about the comments made about the structure of

their essays. In their minds this proved that their reviewers did not check the essay carefully.

Some students claimed that they received feedback that did not make any sense. Those students

felt that their peer reviewers failed to provide any comments that could help them expand their

essays in any way. The following excerpts from interview transcripts reflect themes that

constantly recurred in the group interviews.

Excerpt One: Second Individual Interview with Leo in Group 4

Hsu: What kind of help did you receive from your peer’s review?
Leo: I realized that I constantly used certain specific grammar structures, and I would
think about it.
Hsu: What do you mean with “I will think about it?”
Leo: That means I would try not to make the same mistakes again.
Hsu: Did it mean that you totally accepted all of the review?
Leo: No, I don’t believe them actually.
Hsu: By what criteria do you judge their advice?
Leo: Just what I told you. I will consider it.

Excerpt Two: Second Interview with Students in Group 3

Hsu: What do you think of peer review?

Student 1: To be honest, I myself hardly understand the basic English tenses. How
would I know how to review an essay? [Other students nodded their heads.]
Hsu: Putting aside the fact that you don’t know how to review an essay, did you
receive any help from your reviewer’s feedback?
Student 1: I didn’t understand their responses.

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 Student 2: I got feedback like “good” or “excellent.”
Student 3: I didn’t know whether or not they actually gave me correct advice.
[Because he had doubts about himself.]
Hsu: Then would your dare incorporate their advice into your essay since you didn’t
really trust their ability?
Student 3: Well, I still will take their suggestions into consideration. [Other students
nodded.]

Excerpt Two underscores the point made earlier about students doubting both their peers’

ability and their own ability. Even though they questioned their peer’s comments, these students

still were willing to take others’ ideas into consideration. In Excerpt Three below, however,

students bluntly indicated that their peer’s comments were useless and could not be trusted.

Excerpt Three: Second Interview with Students in Group 5

Student 1: My reviewer only told me that I had to write more. That’s all. Nothing
else.
Student 2: They are optimistic.
Hsu: So, they didn’t offer you useful advice?
All Students: [Shaking of heads to answer “No.”]
Student 2: My reviewer said that I wrote well.
Hsu: Did you actually read your reviewer’s feedback?
All Students: [Bursts of laughter as if I had asked a ridiculous question.]
Student 3: They did not actually give feedback.
Student 4: Their comments didn’t make any sense.
Hsu: Does that mean that you have no faith in those reviews offered by your peers?
All Students: [Nodding of heads to answer “Yes.”]

Many students who did not find the peer review process to be valuable indicated that Mr.

Liu’s demonstration about how to provide comments on an essay did not provide a solid basis for

them to review other students’ essays. They viewed this demonstration as just another lecture in

their EFL class. When I observed those classes, including the EFL and the writing sessions, only

a few students concentrated on the lecture. Most students paid little attention and were

daydreaming, doodling, or dozing off – especially the students in the back of the classroom.

When asked about this classroom behavior, several replied that they could only understand part

of the sessions anyway, so it was not worth the effort to pay attention.

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 Students, as noted in the above discussion, gave two main reasons for failing to review

their peers’ essays according to the guidelines. They felt that they did not have the ability to

review the essays in a manner that would be both insightful and grammatically correct, and they

were confused by the process as it had been presented by Mr. Liu. Excerpt Four discusses some

of the ways in which students failed to follow the peer review guidelines, and Excerpt Five is

indicative of the frustration many students felt with this aspect of the multiple-draft approach to

writing.

Excerpt Four: Second Interview with Students in Group 5

Hsu: So peer review demonstration was useless to all of you?

Student 1: Because we didn’t know what mistakes they [referring to their classmates]
made in their essays.
Hsu: Didn’t Mr. Liu explain every mistake on the sample?
Student 1: That was easy for him. We were unable to detect the errors in the essays
we were working with.
Hsu: So you could not apply the training to a real situation?
Student 2: No, these essays were different. What we thought was correct might
actually be wrong.
Hsu: So this troubled you most because you are not sure if you have the knowledge
needed to review an essay?
Student 2: Yes, I am afraid what I think is correct is actually wrong.

Excerpt Five: Conversations with Students in Group 3

Hsu: Did Mr. Liu’s demonstration help you when reviewing others’ essays?
Student 1: Not exactly, because it was a different essay [referring to the sample that
Mr. Liu used in his demonstration]. When checking another essay [written
by a student], I was unable to apply what Mr. Liu had taught in the process.
Student 2: Little help!
Student 3: I still don’t know how to review an essay.

In addition to talking with students about the peer review process, the researcher also felt

it was important to solicit the reaction of Mr. Liu, the students’ regular EFL teacher, to the peer

review component of the multiple-draft approach to writing. He indicated that, in his view, the

success of a peer review component is dependent, to a great extent, on the participant students’

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abilities. He summed it up in one sentence: “If a student’s ability is not good, there is no way for

that student to provide useful comments on their peer reviews.”

Mr. Liu realized that most of his students did not have sufficient proficiency in English to

do justice to the peer review component even though they had studied English for at least 7 years.

For reasons discussed in detail in earlier chapters, there was nothing he could do in his classes to

remedy this situation during the short time this study was in progress. Even so, Mr. Liu did not

want to simply abandon the process of peer review. In his words, peer review “…takes time [that

neither the teacher nor the students actually have in this school]. It is a fact that some students do

have poor ability, but we teachers should think of ways to motivate and guide them. You cannot

give up this strategy [peer review] because of students’ low ability.” Mr. Liu’s thoughts on peer

review, as influenced by his own teaching philosophy, are summarized nicely and succinctly in

Excerpt Six.

Excerpt Six: From a Researcher-Teacher Exit Interview

Hsu: So, are we concluding here that there is no benefit of applying peer review
strategies in the class because students’ current abilities are too low?
Liu: It would be arbitrary to say that there is no benefit at all. Let’s say that there are
some advantages to some students with good ability. As we Chinese emphasize,
learning cannot totally dependent on the teacher.... [Mr. Liu thinks for a moment
at this point.] Besides following the teacher step by step, they also have to learn
on their own….

The Facts about Teacher-Student Discussion Meetings and Teacher’s Written Comments

After considering the body of material collected from student interviews and informal

conversations about how students perceived their discussion meetings with the teacher and the

written comments provided on their drafts, the researcher determined that the extensive

comments made by seven students in Group 4 would provide a balanced view on behalf of all

students who participated in the study. These views are reflected in the paragraphs that follow.

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 Tony: The discussion meetings with Mr. Liu gave Tony an opportunity to seek help on

how to develop the content of his essay, and they enabled him to clarify written comments from

the teacher that he found confusing. For example, he was not sure how to use conjunctions, such

as “when” and “because.” He was able to get clarification in these meetings. In addition, Mr. Liu

provided oral comments within the context of Tony’s original ideas, and Tony felt that his

sentences were structured better after the meetings. As to how he used the teacher’s written

comments, he indicated that, because he had never had the experience of writing essays before,

he accepted whatever the teacher suggested as long as his sentences could be structured using

grammatically correct English. Tony claimed that the discussion sessions helped him most by

improving the content of his essay, but he also credited the meetings with helping him with

organization and grammar.

Eric: For Eric, those teacher-student discussion meetings provided an opportunity to

explain his ideas so that Mr. Liu could give him suggestions on how to correct things he had

missed in his essay. In addition, Eric referred to his mistakes so that Mr. Liu could use these

meetings to clarify issues that he had pointed in written comments but that still caused Eric some

confusion. Eric usually did not lack opinions on the topic at hand, but he lacked the ability to

organize ideas logically. He felt that, in these discussion meetings, he received appropriate help

with his organizational skills, but he admitted that he did not incorporate everything Mr. Liu said

in the meetings into his essays. On the other hand, Eric credited the written comments from his

teacher with helping him improve his command of English grammar, particularly in regard to

verb tenses.

Wade: In the teacher-student discussion meetings, Wade simply asked questions

regarding the teacher’s written comments that he had received in the hope that Mr. Liu would

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rephrase the comments in a way that he would be able to understand. In other words, these

meetings were from Wade’s perspective – opportunities to confirm his understanding of specific

concepts so that he could incorporate the information into his essay. For example, he had studied

conjunctions for years, but he did not really understand that a conjunction was used in English to

connect two sentences. For him, these meetings provided help at the times he needed it. When he

had a topic in mind, he would ask Mr. Liu’s guidance on sentence structure. When he had

writer’s block, he would ask Mr. Liu for ideas. However, Wade felt that it was important for him

to write in his own voice. He said that he made a conscious effort to avoid incorporating

suggestions from the teacher into his essays if the comments were not consistent with the

thoughts he was trying to present originally.

Sandy: When she pondered the written comments from the teacher, Sandy felt she had

sufficient information to make progress with English grammar usage because Mr. Liu corrected

all grammatical mistakes rather than correcting only a few selected mistakes. She consequently

used the discussion meetings to ask Mr. Liu follow-up questions, to which she received

immediate answers. This made it easier for Sandy to write future drafts of her essays and, in

general, enhanced her writing experience. She also asked for help in the meetings on how to

develop the content of her essays more fully. She claimed that she put all of the teacher’s

comments about content development to use in one way or the other when she wrote her second

draft.

Hana: Only when she had a specific question would Hana speak up in the discussion

meetings. Otherwise, she said she remained silent. She felt the meetings were useful in helping

her determine how to organize her essay and how to enrich her essay’s content. She also credited

the discussion meetings with helping her express ideas in well-structured English sentences

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without grammatical errors. Hana stressed that she did not incorporate every suggestion made by

the teacher into her essay but that, before putting any new ideas in her second draft, she would

first make sure that the idea did not contradict anything that she had written before about what

she believed. Her focus was whether she could develop her story logically without writing

something that was beyond her ability. Finally, she commented that Mr. Liu’s positive comments

affirmed that she was making progress in her ability to write in English, and these comments

always encouraged her to write more.

Leo: The teacher-student discussion meetings gave Leo ideas. When the teacher told him

how to simplify his long sentences in English or mentioned things he should pay attention to in

order to not to make grammatical mistakes, he felt that he finally was learning how to use the

language. He learned from his mistakes, and he appreciated the fact that Mr. Liu made detailed

comments about the mistakes when providing written comments. He also appreciated Mr. Liu’s

detail explanations about mistakes that were provided orally. Leo repeatedly said that he learned

how to use conjunction in these discussions, as well as how to write a topic sentence and where

to put the subject. In addition, he credited the discussion meetings with helping him pay more

attention to the logic of cause and effect in the essay. Leo emphasized that he could apply the

teacher’s written comments only if he fully understood them, and these meetings gave him the

chance to do just that. This did not mean, however, that he would give up on comments that were

beyond his ability to understand. It meant, rather, that he felt secure only when he applied what

he actually understood. As to the spelling mistakes and grammar errors that Mr. Liu corrected in

his drafts, Leo said that he religiously checked all of them as suggested.

Nina: When the instructor focused on the specific questions she had about her essays in

the teacher-student discussion meetings, Nina developed a better understanding of grammar and

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certain vocabulary. She showed the most improvement in grammar, but she had also made

significant improvement in organization. Nina claimed that the teacher’s written comments

typically were in tune with her original thoughts. Because the written comments already

provided sufficient information, she did not need to look for more detailed information on her

own. When determining whether or not to incorporate the teacher’s comments into future drafts

of an essay, Nina said she would first take a look at all the comments and then she make

decisions about whether the comments agreed with her position. In the end, she usually

incorporated almost all teacher’s comments, both written and verbal written. In sum, Nina

claimed that she learned a lot through these processes about correct grammar in general and

about the use of English conjunctions in particular.

Overall Student Perceptions

Teacher-student discussion meetings provided a great communication forum. Usually,

only a few students would spare their personal time to consult with the instructor regarding their

drafts. These discussion meetings provided most students with the opportunity to raise questions

about the written comments the teacher had made about their work. Students indicated that they

first tried to absorb these comments on their own, and in those discussion meetings they then

could confirm whether or not they had sufficient understanding of the comments to avoid making

the same errors again. Because they received direct face-to face feedback from the teacher that

dealt with their own unique situations, they considered the discussion meetings to be an effective

and efficient component of the multiple-draft approach to writing. Students felt such interaction

with the teacher was much more useful to them than the teacher’s lectures on commonly-seen

mistakes, which often did not relate to the issues they had in their own essays.

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 In regard to the teacher’s written comments, the students likewise provided

overwhelmingly positive feedback and expressed thanks that the teacher’s comments were very

thorough. In the beginning, most of them felt frustrated and confused when seeing red comments

all over the drafts. As they followed the instructor’s written guidance, however, students began

to perceive this component of the multiple-draft approach as beneficial. At the end of the

experimental program, some students even commented that the teacher’s written comments made

them think that writing could be enjoyable.

In comparison to the teacher feedback, on the other hand, most students felt that it was a

waste of time to listen to their peers. In one way, the students may have prejudged incorrectly the

potential value of this component of the multiple-draft approach to writing in that they claimed

they did not see how a realization of another student’s difficulties could bring anything useful to

their own essays. Their point of view, to put it bluntly, was that they already had enough

difficulties of their own to deal with. Even when the teacher addressed language issues that a

large number of their peers found difficult, students tended not to pay attention because they did

not believe that the discussion had anything to do with their own essays.

To sum up, students provided positive feedback on the teacher-student discussion

meetings, and many students suggested that more time for this activity be incorporated into the

multiple-draft approach to writing. After initially reacting negatively to the component of the

multiple-draft approach that involved written comments from the teacher on their individual

essays, an overwhelming number of students eventually viewed this component, too, in a

positive manner. Of the three components evaluated in this chapter, only peer review was viewed

in a negative light by students from start to finish.

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 CHAPTER NINE

Thoughts regarding the Case Study

In this chapter, the factors that influenced the results of the multiple-draft writing case

study are explained, which includes the reasons why exam-oriented interactions could not benefit

English writing development, how cultural perspectives worked for language learning, how

effective communication from the teacher could elevate students’ motivation in writing, how

peer review were not supported by students, and how the insufficient support from the school

administration influence the teacher’s approach and methodology.

Interaction Aimed at Exam-Oriented Goals Might Not Be Sufficient in a Particular

Classroom for English Writing Development

Every theory of second language acquisition hypothesizes that learners come to know the

grammatical properties of a target language through involvement in meaningful conversation

(Carroll, 1999). Though students themselves might not perceive that their teacher identifies their

learning via those oral interactions consciously initiated by the teacher, the more often the

interactions take place, the better the teacher can detect students’ challenges. Our study at HD

High School was implemented in such a manner that little interaction took place in the language

classroom, and the instructor consequently had difficulty determining the level of individual

students’ comprehension.

De Saussure (1986, p. 24) distinguished between writing and conversation by asserting

that “writing itself is not part of the internal system of the language” and that “the spoken word

alone” constitutes the object of the linguistic theory. Bloomfield (1987, p. 255) stated that “the

art of writing is not part of language, but rather a comparatively modern invention for recording

and broadcasting what is spoken.” Johnston (2004) indicated that the individual can deliver and

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receive messages in order to develop or cease relationships, to provide feedback, and to try to

influence another person through written language and spoken language. These perspectives

mirror the theory of the development of literacy as proposed by the Vygotskyans (see chapter 3)

in that they posit that the development of literacy depends on the spoken language, with written

text being merely an interpretation of the spoken language.

Based on this perspective, we expected the interaction between the students and the

teacher in the foreign language classroom to provide a means for teachers to measure the level of

each individual student’s comprehension. In Mr. Liu’s lecture sessions, however, not much

interaction took place, and the interaction that did take place was almost invariably initiated by

the teacher in the form of questions that students were asked to answer. Usually, those questions

were based on the lessons students had studied previously, which meant that the goal of the

interaction was merely to prod the students’ memories and determine how much students could

retrieve from long-term memory. By contrast, Vygotsky and his followers believe that

internalization is a series of dialogues taking place between experts and learners, with tasks and

environment being variables. When learners constantly negotiate input from outside influences

and remodel their cognition accordingly, internalization takes place. When there is little

interaction with the teacher, students have few opportunities to remodel their understanding of

the language learning.

In theory, Mr. Liu’s regular EFL class sessions were supposed to offer students a basis

for developing academic-oriented testing skills. Because students did not receive enough input

from those sessions to remodel their misconceptions or apply the language skills to tasks other

than exam sheets, however, the majority of students were unable to apply what they learned in

EFL classes to real-life scenarios. In other words, in this sort of exam-oriented classroom with

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interaction based on the initiation-response model, educators cannot expect to gain useful

perceptions of an individual student’s actual needs in regard to learning the target language

(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987, Moll, 1989; Wells, 1990).

A Mutually Respectful Relationship between Teacher and Student Renders an Improved

Atmosphere for Learning

Mr. Liu’s encouraging attitude and his enormous tolerance toward marginal academic

performance and classroom behavior created a mutually respectful atmosphere in the classroom.

As a teacher, Mr. Liu respected the students’ dignity. He routinely called upon students with

better proficiency in English to interact with him during the classroom sessions, and he seldom

called upon students with poor language skills because he did not wish to embarrass them in

front of their peers. As this researcher observed, however, this approach led to unintended

consequences. Because some students realized that their teacher did not have high expectations

for them, there was less tension in the classroom because these students felt less stress. On the

other hand, this realization also made these students less willing to put effort into EFL

assignments. They felt that they did not have to take EFL seriously because the teacher always

would be encouraging, regardless of how marginal their performance might be. Even so, all EFL

students were respectful toward Mr. Liu even though his instruction would be of significant help

only to students with more advanced language skills.

Given the pleasant atmosphere Mr. Liu maintained in the classroom, students felt secure.

The students with lower proficiency in English realized, however, that they lacked the ability to

read advanced essays or write an essay. Rogers (2002) explained this phenomenon by suggesting

that students are in the process of constituting their own identities when they and their families

interact with those at their school and, as a result, students tend to define themselves as readers

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and writers by adopting the words that their language teacher has used in describing them. Along

these same lines, Skeggs (2008) stated that students may believe they were forced to accept the

models promoted by the teachers if the teacher did not provide a flexible perspective from which

students could develop their own identities. Both Rogers and Skeggs agree, consequently, that

students are greatly influenced by, among other factors, the teacher’s behavior, attitude,

expectations, and emotions. It should be noted that Mr. Liu’s decision to interact selectively with

students based upon their level of proficiency in the target language proficiency served to

strengthen the traditional Chinese view of the teacher as an authority figure. Regardless of

whether or not the students absorbed knowledge from the teacher, they were inclined to follow

the teacher’s instructions unquestioningly. When a teacher’s attitude toward students is

considerate, students gain a better appreciation for the teacher. During our experiment in

implementing a multiple-draft approach to writing, it became clear that this approach on the part

of the teacher, regardless of whether the classroom focus was teacher-centered or student-

centered, helped students feel more secure and more confident.

Effective Communication from the Teacher Puts Students in a Better Position to Incorporate

Teacher Comments into Future Drafts

In Chinese culture students have a tendency to accept all comments from the teacher even

if they have difficulty incorporating those comments into their revisions. In fact, even the

students with lower levels of proficiency in English tend to accept all comments from the teacher

even if they do not understand them. Studies by both Crawford (1992) and Hyland (1998, 2000)

indicate that students in other cultures, too, will accept written feedback from the teacher without

understanding the reasoning behind it. Some scholars (e.g., Conrad & Goldstein, 1999; Goldstein

& Kohls, 2002) stress that, even when students understand the comments, they might not have

the strategies to revise their essays. Saito (1994) states that students’ problems with the teacher’s

145
comments stem from their inability to understand precisely what the teacher is trying to

communicate, which in turn makes it impossible for students to revise their drafts in accordance

with those comments. Our experience with implementing the multiple-draft approach to writing

at HD High School proved to be consistent with the conclusions drawn by these scholars. Our

students, too, were willing to accept the teacher’s comments, and they wanted to incorporate all

of these comments into their drafts. They just did not know how to do it. After encountering a

similar situation in her own research, Ferris (1999) commented that the students and the teacher

need to communicate in a way that leads to a mutual understanding of the issues at hand so that

the students will be in a position to revise their drafts in accordance with the teacher’s wishes.

In our study, the teacher-student meetings provided an opportunity for this improved

teacher-student communication. Although our students gave positive feedback on these group

meetings, they suggested that, for several reasons, the meetings might be of greater benefit if the

meetings were one-on-one. First, not all students have the same questions, so one-on-one

meetings would be a better environment for receiving answers to their individual questions. In

addition, some students did not want to ask questions during the group meetings because they

worried that their questions might be viewed derisively by their peers. Finally, there was so

much demand on the teacher’s time in the group meetings that individual students did not have

the opportunity to delve sufficiently into the specific comments from the teacher that they did not

understand. In short, the students at HD High School felt that a switch to individual meetings

would allow for more effective communication between the teacher and the students, thereby

putting students in a better position to implement the teacher’s suggestions for improving their

writing. However, the reality had already been that it was so difficult to squeeze time out from

students’ tight academic schedule for the teacher to host those teacher-students meetings. Mr.

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Liu and I already tried hard to manage time in students’ EFL regular class sessions and their

night class sessions for those meetings to happen. Unless the school is willing to officially put

writing sessions into the school curriculum, it is impossible to manage more time for the teacher-

students meetings, let along the one-on-one meeting.

Student Awareness of a Peer’s Level of Proficiency in the Target Language Made them

Hesitant to Accept Peer Review

In our study, most peers were reluctant to provide feedback to a fellow student, and most

students did not trust the feedback generated by peers who were known to have marginal

proficiency in English. Allaie and Connor (1990) found that cultural factors significantly

influence the effectiveness of peer feedback. Nelson and Murphy (1993) found out that Chinese

students did not trust the feedback from non-native speakers of English and, in general, did not

feel it was appropriate for them to judge the writing of other students. Carson and Nelson (1994)

indicated that Chinese-speaking students preferred group harmony to the possibility of

embarrassing their peers. All of these studies focused specifically on Chinese students and

emphasized the influences of Chinese culture.

At HD High School one could argue, however, that the main reason students did not

embrace the notion of peer review was the low level of proficiency in English exhibited by the

great majority of students. Many students knew that they themselves had marginal skills in

English, and they were well aware of the proficiency level of each of their peers. The aim of the

peer review component in our study had been to provide content-oriented feedback from a

reader’s point of view rather than focusing solely on grammar and spelling. Students were

constantly told to give a try, but most students felt incapable of providing useful feedback. In

most cases students did not follow the “Peer Review Guidelines,” but instead tried to provide

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limited feedback that was similar to what their teachers had provided on writing assignments

over the years. Often the peer feedback came with the caveat that the peer reviewer might not

really know what they were talking about. It is clear that, with few exceptions, low levels of

language proficiency made the peer review component unworkable with the group of students

involved in our study. Any contribution specific to Chinese culture played only a secondary role

in this study, if any.

Insufficient Support from the School Administration Dictates the Teacher’s Approach and

Methodology

Whenever a teacher incorporates specific sequences of activities into classroom

instruction, he/she is displaying the various aspects of instruction and demonstrating the

effectiveness thereof, regardless of whether those activities were designed ahead of time and

introduce new skills and practices (Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986). At HD High School, however,

Mr. Liu was unable to focus on classroom activities because the administration pressured him to

keep up with the curriculum for the sake of academic performance as measured by standardized

testing. When there is interaction in the classroom, a teacher has the opportunity to adjust his or

her instruction to fit students’ needs. This interactive model unfortunately could not be

implemented in our study.

Due to mandates from the administration, the interaction Mr. Liu provided was

necessarily centered on delivering his general interpretation of the essays to the students. Toward

this end he could interact only with certain students who exhibited a greater level of proficiency

in English. Every classroom activity is associated with a goal or expectation for students. When

the classroom is composed primarily of lectures with little in the way of practical application,

however, teachers gain little insight about an individual student’s progress.

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 Cumming (1992) claims that ESL composition instruction should focus on a discourse

that is established by structural units called, interchangeably, routines, scripts, or transactions.

Through the sequences of communication between the teacher and students, verbal exchanges

become the smaller units of the teaching routines, and the routines, which enable the classroom

activities, are the behavior units that comprise the pedagogical activities. Given the current

situation at his school, it is impossible for Mr. Liu to structure the composition activity through

delicate units because the school administration is unwilling to include writing session in the

formal curriculum.

Extensive Reading Might Not Be an Appropriate Tool for Motivating Students, and Might

Instead Contribute to Students Falling Behind Academically

Mr. Liu believed strongly that reading extensively leads to good writing because, when

they read, students absorb information about content, vocabulary, and grammatical usage. This

approach to EFL teaching was supported by studies in earlier decades.

The input hypothesis (Krashen, 1982) held that comprehensive input creates sufficient

conditions for second language acquisition. The more contact foreign language learners have

with various forms of the target language, the better the possibility that they will develop a high

level of proficiency in the language. The reading hypothesis, also by Krashen (1993), stated that

extensive reading can improve various abilities, such as reading comprehension, wiring styles,

vocabulary, grammar, and spelling. Ellis (2005) agreed with Krashen, emphasizing the

importance of enormous input for second-language acquisition. He pointed out that extensive

reading had been identified as one of the simple pedagogical activities in an input-rich learning

setting. Grabe and Stoller (1997) confirmed that extensive reading had an influence on

vocabulary. However, they indicated that foreign language teachers sometimes remove this

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pedagogical activity prematurely from the curriculum because it takes time for the benefits of

extensive reading to become noticeable. Yamashita (2002) conducted a follow-up to Grabe and

Stoller’s study in which thirty-eight university student participants were exposed to written

English and were given both a placement/progress test (cloze test) and an extensive reading test.

They discovered that, in the traditional intensive reading classes, readers read difficult texts at a

slow pace and stopped at times to consult a dictionary or a translation because they had not

received sufficient training in reading strategies such as predicting, integrating, keeping

information in memory, and using their own perspectives to evaluate text information.

Yamashita went on to conclude that teachers should offer students reading materials that they

can read on their own without having to stop to consult dictionaries because, when students read

for pleasure, they make better progress in learning the target language.

While Mr. Liu’s methodology of requiring students to read extensively was supported by

the literature, the approach was not workable in his classroom at HD High School. The majority

of his students had such marginal skills in English that they could not absorb much in the way of

useful information from any of the assigned readings. One might argue that Mr. Liu simply

needed to choose reading material at a level that would fit students’ needs. Such material,

however, was not easy to find, and the task was made more difficult by the time constraints

imposed on teachers by the school administration. The more basic reading material he did assign

often went unread because students still perceived it as too difficult to be of use.

The Journey of Essay Writing Needs to be Augmented by Teacher Comments That Are

Student-Centered

From Mr. Liu’s perspective, reviewing a student’s essay means to paraphrase that essay

and make that essay a product with neat structure, advanced vocabulary, and consistent ideas. It

150
is common that when there was no specific forum in which a student could discuss his or her

ideas and revisions with the teacher, the students tended to accept all of the teacher’s comments

and discard their personal points of view in order to resolve any differences of opinion. In order

to further develop the students’ skills in organization and content in this research project, we

provided comments to participants in this research project that were designed to develop the

students’ Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) with their peers in peer editing. This approach

was described in detail in Chapter 2.

As Pattery-Chavez, Matsumura and Valdes (2004) stated, writing should focus on a cycle

of revision, and in this approach feedback from teachers was one of the keys. However, in

Chinese culture, as noted earlier in this chapter, students regard the teacher as an authority figure.

The danger consequently exists, as noted by Knoblauch and Brannon (1984), that the student’s

voice might be neglected in the feedback process and that the teacher could essentially “steal”

the writing from the writer. In order to develop their writing and cognitive skills, the teacher

must offer suggestions based on the ideas emerging from students’ broken sentences rather than

provide only directive comments that focus on grammatical mistakes and syntax.

In our study at HD High School, this particular student-centered approach was unfamiliar

to Mr. Liu, who had, himself, built up a student-friendly atmosphere for teaching writing to high

school in Taiwan. This time-intensive multiple-draft approach was difficult to implement

because of the teaching load and time constraints placed on teachers at this school. Eventually,

however, the written comments provided to students about their essays and the oral comment

offered during the teacher-student meetings together received positive feedback from students.

Students claimed that the new approach helped them retain their own voices while they revised

their sentences based on the teachers’ input. They liked the fact that they could decide for

151
themselves which of the teacher’s comments should be incorporated into the second draft and

final draft. In other words, writing became a process not only for revision but also for

reconciliation, rethinking, and making decisions about how to make their ideas understood, how

to make their examples more persuasive, and what vocabulary would best express what they

mean.

Final Thoughts

This study reflected on how a teacher of English as a Foreign Language can influence a

student’s writing ability in both positive and less-than-positive ways. This in-depth case study

mirrors the challenges that most teachers encounter in an educational setting.

The findings of this study indicate clearly that it is important for writing teachers to

maintain a student-centered focus in their classrooms in order to build meaningful

communication with students that fosters a mutual understanding of the teaching objectives. A

teacher’s best efforts in this regard, however, will be for naught unless the communication model

is also extended to parents and school administrators. Parents are more likely to be supportive of

what goes on in the classroom if they understand the teacher’s approach toward reaching stated

objectives, and the school administration must understand and support appropriate pedagogy in

the EFL classroom.

It is inevitable in any school setting that the senior high school students who have taken

courses in EFL for many years will have levels of proficiency in English that vary greatly. The

teacher must then offer differentiated teaching. When a great number of students have very

marginal skills in English, as is the case at HD High School, a teacher can implement a

differentiated teaching curriculum only if the administration fully understands the situation and is

willing to devote financial and personnel resources to addressing the problem. What I suggest

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here is not that a teacher should discard all advanced EFL materials, but that the teacher must

draw certain foci out of the high school lesson material, emphasize those points, and make sure

students actually acquire specific concepts at one level or another. In this way any students who

are motivated, regardless of skills level, can improve their skills in English.

This is a process that progresses step by step, and it requires a school to formally include

EFL Essay Writing in the curriculum. At the same time, teachers also need to include simple

writing tasks in the traditional EFL classes. For example, the teacher can start by offering a

practice session using a single short sentence that incorporates the foci of the lesson. Students

then can be asked to make connections to the foci by tapping working memory, long-term

memory, and cognitive processes. Once they get accustomed to accomplishing these tasks

successfully, they become motivated to practice writing sentences on an increasing number of

specific topics. After students have accumulated experience in this way over a certain period of

time, the teacher can introduce writing strategies such as brainstorming, topic sentences, and

paragraph development. By gradually expanding the content of the writing sessions in this way,

the transition to more extensive writing tasks can be a smooth one.

This research project also made clear to me that the teacher still is the heart and soul of

the classroom in Chinese culture. Mr. Liu’s conscious attitude toward teaching subconsciously

influenced the students’ perceptions of how English should be learned. Even when he tried new

approaches as part of this study, students went along with his directives without questioning the

change. Despite the fact that the approach we attempted in this study has a solid basis in

pedagogical theory, however, the approach cannot be implemented at HD High School on an

ongoing basis unless the administration is willing and able to devote the necessary resources

toward supporting the teacher in the EFL program.

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 Last but not least, I need to address the matter of assessment. As teachers, it is mandatory

that we teach in accordance with the curriculum that has been approved by the school. We also

are mandated to assess students to determine the extent to which students have mastered various

segments of the curriculum. We cannot stop there, however. An equally important goal for

teachers is whether we can use the results of our assessment tools to gain an accurate perception

of our students’ learning needs. Only if we diagnose the problems in this way can we devise

appropriate solutions that will mitigate the students’ learning difficulties.

To sum up, the lack of fundamental knowledge of English was a major reason that

students could not comprehend the language that was used in the classroom and in various

homework assignments. Their questions in the teacher-student meetings and the mistakes they

made in their essays provided evidence that they struggled with the basics that they were

supposed to have mastered in the first three years of EFL classes. It is true that not all people are

good language learners, but it is realistic to expect students to master basic concepts such as

present tense, past tense, future tense, infinitives, modal verbs, conjunctions and clauses.

Achieving this requires considerable time and effort on the part of the EFL teacher. If we

somehow could spend more time with students who are having difficulties with the basics rather

than giving equal time to every student, we would likely see better results. We might offer the

same curriculum, the same learning objectives, the same learning materials, the same everything

to all students, but this does not guarantee the same achievement from every student. With

students whose pace in learning is faster compared to his/her classmates, we teachers can offer

more in the way of individualized learning tasks and thereby free up instructional time that can

be devoted to students who need more help.

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 When students at HD High School cried out for fundamental knowledge, there was not

much that Mr. Liu could do to address the need. In terms of the school’s expectations, those

students had already learned this basic-level material because they already had studied English

for at least six years. In reality, however, they had accumulated much knowledge about English

that was confusing to them. In an attempt to make our multiple-draft approach meaningful to all

students, we offered simple explanations of those basics according to each student’s needs as

gleaned from their essays. Given the brief timeframe, with little time to practice carefully guided

multiple-draft writing in the early stages of learning to write, the result of the student reports

show promise in that students reported increased personal ownership and confidence to achieve

greater writing competence.

155
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 Appendix A

Rubric for English Essays (English Translation)

The standards for assessment.

173
 There are 20 points in this essay section, mainly to evaluate whether students can use the
knowledge of lexicon, syntax and rhetoric to write a consistent and coherent essay that addresses
the topic.

According to the holistic score, there are five levels to indicate students’ writing
performance.

Writing levels Excellent Very good Fine Poor Very Poor

Holistic score 19-20 15-18 10-14 5-9 0-4
range

A rater will have a holistic score in mind first when finishing reviewing an essay. Then, use the
rubric to check if the holistic score matches with the description of each section in the rubric. In
addition, if the words are obviously fewer than required, take 1 point away; if there is only one
paragraph, take 1 point away; if there are multiple paragraphs, no point is taken away.

174
 Appendix B

First Timed Essay Topic

說明︰1.依提示在「答案卷」上寫一篇英文作文。
2.文長120個單詞(words)左右。

提示︰以“The Most Precious Thing in My Room”為題寫一篇英文作文，描述你的房間內一

件你最珍愛的物品，同時並說明珍愛的理由。(這一件你最珍愛的物品不一定是貴
重的，但對你來說卻是最有意義或是最值得紀念的。

English translation:
Explanation: 1.Write an English essay on the “answer sheet.” 2. The length of the essay should
be around 120 words.

Use “The Most Precious Thing in my Room” as the topic to write an essay. Please describe

one of your favorite objects in your room, and also give reasons to why you cherish it. (This

object may not be the most valuable, but it means a lot to you).

Second Timed Essay Topic

說明︰1.依提示在「答案卷」上寫一篇英文作文。 2.文長120個單詞 (words)左右。

提示︰
請以 “Music Is An Important Part of Our Life” 為題，說明音樂（例如古典音樂、流行
歌曲、搖滾音樂等）在生活中的重要性，並以你或他人的經驗為例，敘述音樂所帶來的好
處。
English Translation:

Explanation: 1.Write an English essay on the “answer sheet.” 2. The length of the essay should
be around 120 words.

Please adopt “Music is An Important Part of Our Life” as a topic and explain the importance

of music (such as classic music, pop music, rock music and etc.) in our lives. Take your personal

or other’s experience as an example to describe the benefits that come from music.

175
 Appendix C

Student Discussion sheet ( Topic One: A World without Electricity)

1. Please talk about your experience when there is no electricity.

2. How does everyone react when there is no electricity?

3. What is the influence of our life when there is no electricity?

4. What are the disadvantages when there is no electricity?

5. What are the benefits when there is no electricity?

6. What is the influence of our life when there is no electricity?

7. How would you write your essay? And if you have any question, please speak it out and

let your group member help you.

Student discussion sheet (Topic Two: Advertisements)

1. Please talk the advertisement or TV commercial that impress you most.

2. What are the factors that caught your attention? Music? Theme? Characters? Or scene?

Please describe it.

3. How does this advertisement connect to your life experience?

4. What’s your reaction after watching this piece of advertisement?

5. What do you think of influence of an advertisement?

6. How would you write your essay? And if you have any question, please speak it out and

let your group member help you.

176
 Appendix D

Topic One for Multiple Draft Writing Approach

說 明 ： 1. 依 提 示 在 「 答 案 卷 」 上 寫 一 篇 英 文 作 文 。
2. 文長至少120個單詞。

提示：你能想像一個沒有電(electricity)的世界嗎？請寫一篇文章，第一段描述我們的世界沒有了
電以後，會是甚麼樣子，第二段說明這樣的世界是好是壞，並舉例解釋原因。

English Translation:

Prompt:

Could you imagine a world without electricity? Please write an essay. In the first
paragraph, please describe what our world would look like without electricity. In the second
paragraph, please describe whether it is good when there is no electricity in the world, and please
explain your reasons by providing examples.

Topic Two for Multiple Draft Writing Approach

說 明 ： 1. 依 提 示 在 「 答 案 卷 」 上 寫 一 篇 英 文 作 文 。
2. 文長至少120個單詞。
提示：廣告在我們生活中隨處可見。請寫一篇大約 120-150 字的短文，介紹一則令你印象
深刻的電視或平面廣告。第一段描述該廣告的內容（如：主題、故事情節、音樂、
畫面等），第二段說明該廣告令你印象深刻的原因。
English translation:
Explanation: 1. Write an English essay on the “answer sheet.” 2. The length of the essay should
be around 120 words.

Prompt:

Advertisement is pervasive in our daily lives. Please write an essay with 120 to 150

words, introducing a piece of advertisement or TV commercials that impressed you MOST. In

the first paragraph, please gave a description about the content of that piece (for example, theme,

plots, music, and scene), and in the second paragraph, please explains why it impressed you).

177
 Appendix E

Student’s First Interview Questions

(After the first timed essay)

General questions.

1. Could you please describe your English writing ability?

2. What kind of writing training did you receive before? Please describe it. Also, please talk
about how the training helped with your writing?

3. Have you ever been asked to write in any forms? If you do, please tell me what kind of
tasks you have completed and how you handled those tasks.

4. In general, what are the challenges/difficulties that you often encounter in writing in
English? How did solve them?

5. Have you ever helped your peers to write by having peer review or been helped by your
peers? If you have, please tell me what your concerns were when doing or receiving peer
responses.

6. How do you deal with your writing products after receiving teacher’s comments?

7. Do you agree that learning to write is important? Why are students required to write?
Please give me your personal opinion.

Questions designed particular for the first timed writing essays.

8. How did you feel when you wrote under time pressure? Please describe how you wrote
your timed essay.

9. What do you think of the quality of your timed essay? In which aspect did you do well
and in which aspect you didn’t do well?

10. What are the challenges/ difficulties that you encountered in writing the essay? Please
describe in detail.

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 11. Do you think your writing ability was reflected?

12. What help do you need to help with your writing?

Students’ Second Interview Questions

General questions about multiple drafts approach

1. What do you think of the multiple drafts practices in the past 12 sessions?
2. What do you think of the discussions or activities before writing for the first draft? Did they help
you to sort ideas and plan for the development of the content? Any challenges or difficulties?
3. What are the activities or assistance that you need most when planning to write?
Questions about peer review

4. What do you think of the peer reviews that you received? What are the challenges, difficulties or
benefit of peer reviews that you perceived? Please describe in detail.
5. Does knowing how to review an essay make you more conscious about what to write in your own
essay?
6. Which aspects of your writing products have improved most because of the peer review?
Questions about peer review training

7. What do you think of the “peer review training”? Are you more conscious about how to review an
essay now?
8. What did you learn from peer review training?
Questions about teacher-student discussion meeting

9. What do you think of teacher-student discussion meetings?

10. What is your understanding of why you need to have the meeting with your instructor?
11. Did you receive the advice and help that you needed in meeting? Explain.
12. Which aspect of your writing products improved most because of the teacher-student discussion
meeting?
Questions about teacher’s comments

13. What do you think of the teacher’s comments?

14. Which aspects of your writing products were improved most because of the teacher’s comments?
15. How did you decide which teacher’s comments to adopt for your final products and what were
your concerns? ( return them their Decision sheets and essays when asking this question)

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Questions about decision sheets

16. How did you make your decisions when filling out your decision sheets?
17. What were your concerns when deciding what comments to adopt for your Draft 2 and Draft 3?
Questions about multiple drafts approach

18. What progress did you make in the past 12 sessions?

19. Do you think you received enough support in the writing process? What support do you need?
20. Except for your peers and the teacher, what other aids did you have?
21. If you are asked to write a timed essay and the genre is similar to what you did in the past weeks,
do you think you can write better?
Questions about content development

22. What instruction or activities in which you participated help with your essay content or
organization ? What support came from the instructor, and what support came from your
peers? Please explain in detail.
23. What support do you think you need to help to develop your essay content?
24. What were your difficulties in improving your essay content? What are your challenges
and difficulties in improving your essay content when accepting multiple drafts approach
to develop your essay content?
Questions about linguistic development

25. What instruction or activities in which you participated helped with your grammar or
vocabularies. What support came from your instructor and what support came from you
peers? Please explain in detail.
26. What help do you think you need to help to develop your essay content?
27. What are your difficulties in improving your linguistic performance? What are your
challenges and difficulties when experiencing multiple drafts approach to develop your
linguistic ability?

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 Student Third Interview Questions

(After the second timed essay)

Comparison of the first timed essay and the second timed essay

1. Could you please compare your experience of writing the first timed essay and the second
timed essay?

2. Please tell me in which aspect that you consider that you did better on the second timed
writing than on the first?

3. Please tell me in which aspects that you think your didn’t do well on those second timed
essays?

4. What are the challenges/ difficulties that you encountered in the writing process of the
second timed essays? How did you do deal with them?

5. How you think your writing ability was reflected in the second timed essay? According to
the answer, ask why.

Questions about extra help that students need for their writing

6. What do you need to with your writing and timed writing?

7. What is the other help that you need with your timed writing?

8. Could you please talk about your overall experience of the past 12 sessions’ writing
practices and how those writing practices help with your writing and timed writing?

9. Do you have faith in yourself that your writing would improve if you engaged in this
approach more often?

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 Appendix F
Teacher’s First Interview Questions

Teacher experience about teaching writing

1. Could you please tell me how long you have taught English in school?

2. Please describe your students’ current English competence.

3. In your own perspective, how important it is for students to become English writers in Taiwan
society?

4. What is your expectation toward students’ writing?

5. Have you ever tried to offer writing instruction in class? If the answer is No. Explain.

If the answer is YES, ask the following questions:

a) Could you please describe the approaches that you applied before?
b) Please describe the procedures in a regular writing class to me?
c) What are you strategies to improve students’ linguistic development?
d) What are your methods to help students to develop their essay contents and development?
e) What improvement did your students make after receiving your instruction?
Questions about teacher’s effort on developing student’s content and linguistic ability

6. How are your ways to help students to develop the essay content? Could you please make it
specific in which procedure that you scaffold students’ content development in the writing
process?

7. What challenges and difficulties when helping with students’ content development?

8. What are your ways to help with students’ linguistic developments? Could you please make it
specific in which procedure that you scaffold student’s linguistic development in the writing
process?

9. What challenges and difficulties when helping with students’ linguistic development?

Teacher’s attitudes before the writing sessions starts

Questions about peer review

182
 10. What is your opinion about asking Taiwanese high school EFL students to give responses to their
peer’s writing? Do you think it is feasible to ask students to give responses to their peers?

11. Do you think your students have the proper knowledge and ability to give peer review?

Questions about teacher-student discussion meeting

12. What do you think of hosting the teacher-student’ discussion meeting to improve your students’
writing?

13. When you are invited to host teacher-student discussion meeting, what will be your goals?

Questions about teacher’s comments

14. What are your concerns when giving comments to students’ writing?

15. What would you ask students to do after they receive your comments? Do you think they know
who to adopt your comments?

16. How do you improve students’ essay content, organization, and linguistic development when
giving comments on their essays?

Questions about evaluation

17. How do you judge the progress of students’ writing?

18. Based on your personal experience, what are the necessary conditions to help students do well on
their essays?

19. What do you think of timed writing? Do you think students can demonstrate their actual writing
competence under timed conditions? Yes / No? Please give me your reasons.

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 Teacher’s Second Interview Questions (After the multiple drafts approach)

1. Describe how you have applied the multiple drafts approach in your class?

2. How do you define your role in this approach?

Questions about peer review

3. Please give some comments about students’ peer review?

4. What is your opinion about asking students to give responses to their peer’s writing? Do
you think students have the ability and knowledge to give peer responses?

5. What were the benefits and drawbacks that you perceive when students give responses to
each other?

6. Do you think it is feasible to apply “peer review” in Taiwanese high school EFL settings?
Please give me reasons? If the answer is negative, could you think of any other solutions
to replace it based on your experience?

Questions about peer review training

7. What were your expectations toward the result of peer review training? do you think
students’ responses meet your expectation?

8. What was your focus when training students?

9. What were your challenges when you trained students to do peer review?

Questions about teacher-student discussion meeting

10. What did you think of the teacher-student discussion meetings?

11. How did you think the writing help to improve student’s content and linguistic
development in the meetings?

12. What were the benefits and drawbacks that you perceived when having Teacher-student
discussion meeting between drafts?

184
 13. Do you think it is feasible to host “teacher-Student conference” in Taiwanese EFL
settings? Please give me your reasons. If the answer is negative, continue to ask the
teacher if he has any other proper solutions to replace it?

Questions about teacher’s comment

14. What were your concerns when giving comments to student’s essay?

15. What were your follow-up strategies after you give feedback to students’ essays?

16. What use did students make for your comments?

Questions about the instructor himself when hosting the discussion meeting

17. What were your challenges when you leading the discussion meeting with students?

18. What were your strategies to scaffold students’ writing in the discussion meeting?

19. What were your expectations toward the goal of discussion meetings?

Questions after applying multiple drafts approach

20. What were the limits that you perceive in apply multiple drafts approach?

21. What were the advantages and disadvantages that the multiple drafts approach brought to
your writing instruction?

22. What were the advantages and disadvantages that the multiple drafts approach brought to
your students?

23. What do you think of applying the multiple drafts approach to enhance students’ writing
ability in order to overcome the challenge of writing a timed essay in admission exams?

24. What are the advantages and drawbacks that you perceive?

25. Do you have any suggestion to make this approach more adoptable in order to localize
it in Taiwanese high school EFL settings?

26. Do you have any other comments on the past 12 sessions that you want to share with me?

185
Questions about teacher’s effort on developing student’s content and linguistic ability in
multiple draft approach

27. How were your ways to help students to develop the essay content? Could you please
make it specific in which procedure that you scaffold students’ content development in
the writing process?

28. What were challenges and difficulties when helping with students’ content development?

29. What were your ways to help with students’ linguistic developments? Could you please
make it specific in which procedure that you scaffold student’s linguistic development in
the writing process?

30. What were the challenges and difficulties when helping with students’ linguistic
development?

186
 Appendix G

Peer Review Guideline Sheet

Draft written by ____________________ Review written by_____________________

Essay topic ________________

Your responsibility is to provide some honest responses to your partners by answering the
following questions. You should offer some advice to help them to write better. Before you start
to answer the following questions, please read your partners essay CAREFULLY. Your advice
should be constructive and specific and try to make it IN DETAIL!

Content structure:

1. Please write down the gist or the focus that you perceive in this essay.

2. What do you like the MOST of the essay? List the interesting idea and explain why.

3. What do you like the LEAST of the essay? Please explain why.

4. What parts of the essay makes you feel confused? Please use the __________ to
emphasize those parts. Then explain why you think they are confusing and also make
some suggestion to make them improved.

5. What parts of the essay should be developed more? Please use { } to emphasize them.
Explain why you think those parts should be developed more and make your suggestion.

Surface structure:

1. Please circle all the spelling errors in red and offer the correct form.

2. Please check the grammar usage (tense, number, modality) in blue and provide the
correct forms.

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 Appendix H

Decision Sheet for Second Draft

(Peer review and Teacher-student discussion meetings)

Which ideas did you adopt from the responses that your partner gave you in your Draft 1?

Please explain why you adopted them?

What ideas did you discard from the responses that your partner gave you?

Please explain your reasons for your decision.

What input did you receive from the teacher-student conference?

Which parts did you put them into your Draft 2?

188
 Appendix I

Decision Sheet for Final Draft

Please list all the teacher’s comments that you adopted into your final essay and explain why you
adopted them in detail.

Please list the rest of teacher’s comments that you discarded and explain your reasons.

189
 CURRICULUM VITAE
Yi-Ting Hsu
hsu8@umail.iu.edu

RESEARCH INTERESTS

ESL/EFL, Chinese as a second language, vocabularies learning, language

learning strategies, writing strategies in L2 skills.

EDUCATION
2017 Indiana University-Bloomington, USA.
PhD in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education.
• Minor: Second Language Acquisition.

2006 National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Completed Teacher Education with a focus on Chinese teaching.

2001 University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA.

Master of Arts in Curriculum & Instruction.

1998 Tunghai University, Taiwan.

Bachelor of Arts in Chinese Literature.

CERTIFICATES
California Clear Single Subject Teaching Credential
• Authorized Subject: Foreign language: Chinese

Teacher’s certificate of Chinese for secondary school & junior high schools
issued by the Department of Education of Republic of China (Taiwan).

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
2017- Present Foreign language teacher, STEM school and Academy, Colorado, USA
• Teach Mandarin to students from 6th to 12th grade.

2014- 2017 Teacher, R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School, California, USA.

 Cupertino Language Immersion Program (CLIP)
• Teach Chinese immersion program in kindergarten

2013-2015 Teacher, Sacred Heart School, California, USA.

CSL program
• Teach Chinese as a Second Language to beginners.

2013-2014 Diablo Valley College, California

• Teaching Assistant in Chinese Program at Foreign Language department

2013-2014 Teacher, ABC Languages, California, USA.

Adult Mandarin Program
• Teach college-level Mandarin classes to adult learners.

2011- 2/2014 Teacher, Cornerstone Learning Foundation, California, USA.

Mandarin immersion program
• Students join the immersion program that aims at developing their
perception on Chinese language and culture. Students are led to do role
play, make speeches, debate or create their own stories by various
approaches that integrate speaking, listening, writing and reading in a
Mandarin-only environment.
• Guided students to compete in the Annual Mandarin speech contest in
California.
• Hosted “Back to school night” to discuss the curriculum, lesson plans
and teaching philosophy, and to build a mutual understanding of young
learners’ learning styles and personalities with their parents.
• Hosted teacher-parent conferences to discuss young learners’ progress in
learning Mandarin.

2009-2010 Internship, Indiana University-Bloomington.

Course title: Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages(focus on 3rd to 7th
grade)
This course guided future teachers to develop lesson plans and materials for
students from 3th -7th grades, introduced theories, examined the teaching
approaches, reviewed those future teachers’ demonstration of their
mini-lessons and discussed the effectiveness of their lesson plans.
2003-2007 Teacher, Erh-Shing Senior High school (7th ~12th grade), Taiwan.
Mandarin classes
Taught senior high school students to appreciate different forms of classic
and modern Chinese literature to develop an understanding of the literacy in
a particular time of Chinese history and furthermore, the meaning behind
those articles.
Ÿ Trained students for Chinese speech competitions.
Ÿ Guided students to do the Chinese drama.

EFL classes
Ÿ Taught EFL class to students to develop students’ perception of speaking,
listening, writing and reading by lectures, group discussions, and
conversation practices. Trained students to compete in English choir
contest and English speech tournaments.

Homeroom teacher
Ÿ Advised students on their academic performance, personal issues, and
behavioral problems, contacted parents with students’ issue and hosted
teacher-parent conferences to discuss students’ overall performance
every semester.

2001- 2003 Teacher, Huey-Deng High school (7th ~12th grade), Taiwan.
Mandarin drama classes
Ÿ Guided students to appreciate classic and modern Chinese novels and
essays, discussed the cause, motivation, development and ending of
those products and the real meaning behind them.
Ÿ Guided students to write their own scripts for Chinese drama
individually or collaboratively.
Ÿ Guided students to do public performances in a school’s outdoor theater.

EFL classes
Ÿ Developed students’ perception of English language by giving grammar
lessons, lecturing on English articles, and writing practices.
Ÿ Trained students to compete in school English speech and writing
contests.
 Ÿ Hosted English drama competitions.

Homeroom teacher
Ÿ Advised students on their academic performance, personal issues, and
behavioral problems, contacted parents with students’ issues and hosted
teacher-parent conferences to discuss students’ overall performance
every semester.
HONORS & ACTIVITIES
2000 President of Taiwanese Students Association (TSA) of University of
Missouri-KC.
1997-1998 Vice-administrator of Student Society of Tunghai University, Taiwan.
1997 Leadership of the Student Association of Department of Chinese Literature,
1997 Certificated Campus Tour Guide, Tunghai University, Taiwan.
1994-1998 Member of Chinese Cross-Talk Club, Tunghai University, Taiwan.
1986-1994 School and class representative for Chinese speech contests.