Developing Metacognitive Awareness of Voice in Academic Writing in English: A Case Study of Second Language Writers

English for academic purposes;Metacognitive awareness;Evaluative voice;Engagement framework;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies

Jou, Yu-ShiangPalincsar, Annemarie Sullivan ;

University of Michigan

关键词: English for academic purposes;    Metacognitive awareness;    Evaluative voice;    Engagement framework;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Educational Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/135902/ysjou_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing research (e.g., Tardy, 2009) has established the importance of building genre knowledge. This study focused on the genre of article review, in which a writer summarizes and evaluates the essential views in an article. As a simple genre that does not involve a full literature review, it is often seen as a preparatory genre that instructors use as a stepping-stone to develop other important genres, such as term papers and research articles. To write this genre, students need to move from a relatively single-voice, uncontested summary to a multi-voiced evaluation. However, the issue of how to manage evaluation in constructing multi-voiced academic texts represents a major challenge to novice writers of English as a second language (L2).This study translates the SFL Engagement framework (Martin & White, 2005) into a pedagogical scheme, exploring how the framework can serve as a heuristic to scaffold L2 writers’ knowledge of voice and how such enhanced awareness may encourage them to experiment with a wider range of repertoires in writing article reviews. This study was located within a writing course in an EAP intensive program. Nine participants came from different linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds. Multiple data sources (semi-structured interviews, audio-taped student interactions as they engaged in text analysis tasks, students’ oral and written reflections, and student writing) were examined to contribute to a greater understanding of the case and to enhance the validity of case study research (Yin, 2014). The findings show that the Engagement constructs focused students’ attention on key voice resources and the rhetorical goals they enabled, providing a heuristic that students could use in their writing. Their varied uptake of Engagement metalanguage and the differential repertoires displayed in their writing reflected different metacognitive developments. Although the Engagement pedagogical scheme served as a major focus in the course under study, it can also support L2 writing instructors in more general ways. The Engagement scheme can be added to instructors’ feedback repertoires as they comment on student writing and offer specific suggestions. This study has the potential to make a substantive contribution to L2 writing pedagogy.