Design and Implementation of an Innovative English Research Writing Course

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Project title

Code/計畫編號

NSC102-2410-H019-006

Translated Name/計畫中文名

英文論文寫作課程的規劃與實踐

Project Coordinator/計畫主持人

Ju-Chuan Huang

Funding Organization/主管機關

National Science and Technology Council

Co-Investigator(s)/共同執行人

李賢德

Department/Unit

Institute of Applied English

Website

https://www.grb.gov.tw/search/planDetail?id=3113205

Year

2013

Start date/計畫起

01-08-2013

Expected Completion/計畫迄

31-07-2014

Co-Investigator(s)

Horng-Yi Chang

Bugetid/研究經費

517千元

ResearchField/研究領域

語文

為因應在許多非英語母語國家的研究生須發表知名英文期刊論文之畢業要求，學者們提出了不同的教學模式。文類教學法能幫助學生熟悉文體結構，並了解結構中語言特性及目的。但此種教學法的問題在於學生通常只分析少量文章範例，無法推斷其分析是否具代表性。語料庫教學法則可讓學生接觸到大量的文本，使學生能在大量的資料中檢視字詞的使用。然而語料庫分析結果通常只顯現目標字的前後幾字，無法讓學生了解目標字在文中的功能。此外，在論文寫作課程中，教學者若對領域內的知識不熟悉，可能無法解決學生在寫作論文時發現的問題。為改善上述之困難，本計畫將結合文本教學法及語料庫教學法之所長，應用在為工程類博班生開設的英語論文寫作課上。語言學者及工程類學者並將共同授課，以解決可能跟內容有關的寫作問題。第一年我們將建置工程類論文語料庫作文類及語料分析，依分析結果及博班生需求分析設計課綱。第二年我們將開設此課，讓學生學習語言特性，分析文本及語料，並寫出一篇論文初稿。本課程將依學生之觀點及寫作進步程度作為評鑑標準。本計畫預期能提出一個有效的教學法，讓學生不僅能學到寫作的技巧，也能了解如何滿足領域內讀者的期待及精進論文發表策略。"Different pedagogical frameworks have recently been proposed in response to the need for equipping graduate students, particularly those whose first language is not English and who have to publish indexed English research articles before graduation, with skills to writing for publication in English. Genre-based pedagogy is a top-down approach that focuses on discourse patterns of a genre; it is considered effective as it can familiarize students with the text structure and sensitize them with the relationship between linguistic features and rhetorical functions (e.g. Cheng, 2007). A problem with genre-based pedagogy is that students are often given a limited number of genre examplars, making it difficult to ensure the representativeness of these texts. Corpus-based pedagogy, a bottom-up approach, can improve this problem by exposing students to a large number of texts where they can examine actual language use. However, this pedagogy has been criticized by presenting words in a decontextualized fashion (Swales, 2002). On the other hand, content knowledge may account for a potential problem in teaching of research writing in English, especially when instructors have little understandings about subject knowledge. To overcome the limitations of these pedagogical frameworks, this two-year project attempts to integrate the genre-based approach and the corpus-based approach in an English research writing course that will be delivered to EFL PhD students in an engineering-related field. In addition, the course will be taught by both language professionals and subject experts to tackle the problem with content knowledge. In the first year, a corpus of research articles in the engineering-related field will be compiled for manual genre analysis and computerized corpus analysis. After the discourse patterns and the salient linguistic features are identified, the materials and syllabus of the research writing course will be designed accordingly and revised according to a needs analysis of the target PhD students. The course will be delivered in the second year; in this course, students will learn the structural and linguistic features, do hands-on genre and corpus analysis, and write an early draft of a research article. The course will be evaluated in terms of students’ writing progress and their perspectives on the combination of different approaches as well as on team teaching. It is expected that this innovative approach to teaching research writing will not only effectively improve students’ skills for writing for publication in English but also enhance their strategies for meeting expectations of their disciplinary discourse communities with the input of subject experts. The findings of this project will also shed light on the field of second/foreign language writing and English for specific purposes by presenting discourse and linguistic features of research articles in this engineering-related field, and by proposing a novel pedagogical framework for teaching English research writing to non-native English speaking graduate students."

Keyword(s)

文類分析
語料分析
協同教學
英文論文寫作
genre analysis
corpus analysis
team teaching
research writing course

DSpace CRIS

Design and Implementation of an Innovative English Research Writing Course

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