d) Usefulness for university and other purposes
This question revealed less (detailed) data than the questions about enjoyability and challenge. When asked whether, and why an assignment or writing activity was useful, a popular response was, ‘to develop/ improve my writing skills’, so further detail was sought. For some pieces of work, participants were not sure why they were useful or why they thought they had been asked to write them. Others had not really considered this until they were asked to think about it, and then they were able to reflect on the usefulness of some writing tasks.
Practising skills
Different writing activities were useful for finding sources, reading, brainstorming, avoiding plagiarism, and engaging in critical thinking. This is the most common set of reasons why participants felt some university assignments and writing tasks were useful. Ton explained that his research report was useful for learning how to find relevant sources. Tran’s literature review was useful to develop reading skills, especially reading research reports and other academic literature. Duc and Linh felt that essay writing and learning about different types of essays (including
argumentative essays) were useful for developing idea brainstorming skills and critical thinking skills. Linh spoke about her postgraduate assignments helping to ‘train her mind’, to think differently and to evaluate more.
Practise for exams and final assignments
This is the second most popular reason given by participants. A number of
participants reported that multiple choice questions and sentence structure exercises were most helpful for exam practice, presumably because this is how the exams were presented. Some undergraduate assignments and MA assignments were regarded as good preparation for graduation papers and research reports. Although many genres were new to participants at MA level, there was a sense of practice and skill
refinement over the course of a module, semester or course. MA ELT students recognised that literature reviews and resource reviews contributed to their final research reports. Two of the (micro) biology majors, were writing building laboratory
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results, which would be used to inform their theses. Although they tended to write their lab reports and results in Vietnamese, their final paper will be written (or translated) into English.
Grammar and subject-specific vocabulary
This is the third most common response. Ton’s case study of a Vietnamese company was useful to learn business-related vocabulary and some phrases. In an earlier assignment he also prepared a presentation about Apple which taught him new vocabulary too. Figure 33 shows a range of new vocabulary related to business strategy such as ‘operating system, hardware, application software and innovative industrial design’.
Figure 33. Example of a presentation slide from Ton’s MBA presentation about Apple.
Ton, Linh and Ngoc found some essays and ‘critical responses’ useful to learn phrases they could reuse again in later pieces of writing. An example of this are the introductions in Ton’s series of critical response assignments (Figures 34, 35 and 36).
These show a recycling of sentence and paragraph structures that is altered slightly for the different topics.
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Figure 36. Introduction by Ton: example 3
Figure 34. Introduction by Ton: example 1
Figure 35. Introduction by Ton: example 2
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Many participants felt that grammar gap-fill exercises were useful to remember grammar rules, sentence structures and use of pronouns for example. Tran found her undergraduate essays useful for learning new phrases that she has been able to use in later writing. Linh also felt the same about the IELTS essays she had been taught to write. Indeed, Linh showed how she transferred this learning into the think aloud tasks. In her essay about American literature, Kim-Ly felt she learnt many new words related to the ‘freedom of speech’ topic. The same applied to Duc’s description of probiotic bacteria. Conversely, his letter-writing assignments, set within the English classes for staff member, were not useful for learning specific vocabulary. Minh’s essay about macroeconomics was also useful for learning economics and accounting-related terms. Tin completed an exercise to record useful vocabulary and structures from a piece of reading. Figure 37 shows the template provided for this type of exercise.
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Preparing for employment
Assignments that were reported to be useful for employment purposes were job application forms, cover letters and research report writing. Tin, Linh, Phuong, Tran, Ngoc, and Ton, had written job or university applications or cover letters in English, but not all of them had had practice for job applications beforehand. Ton’s example of a practice cover letter is evident in Figure 38.
Those who aspired to work in academia, found research report writing useful for future employment, partly due to the desire to be published in English. For
businessoriented students, their assignments were useful to become familiar with the context in which they could work in in the future. For Ton, this could be within a Vietnamese company like the one who wrote a case study about and for Tin, it could be the type of Japanese/ international company he had learnt about in the
international business course. Some MA ELT students wanted to teach English within
Figure 38. Tin’s cover letter exercise.
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a university, rather than a school, but a few thought this was a difficult feat. For those who already taught at university level, they were undertaking classroom-based research for their teaching roles (as a staff member), as well as research for their MA theses. This is research that is undertaken by an active teaching practitioner in order to explore or investigate challenges or topics within their own classrooms. The research they undertook for these purposes was sometimes related, but not always. For example, Phuong explored the relationships between gender (of teachers) and
teaching styles. The participants were the MA students on her course, rather than her teaching colleagues within her university. The pilot participant had undertaken some teacher-research on communicative language activities to engage students in the classroom. The findings were shared with colleagues within the university.
Receiving feedback from peer assessments
Only one participant gave this response when asked about why an essay he had written was useful but three other MA ELT students spoke about the role of peer assessment in their writing processes, and to what extent this is useful for their writing. Technically this is slightly off topic because it is not what made a piece of writing useful but the recurring nature of the topic warrants discussion in the thesis.
Tin found feedback from peers useful to correct the smaller grammar errors that his teacher may not have time to pick up on. It seems peers have time to read
assignments in more detail than their teachers. Tran found peer assessment useful to ensure her ideas and arguments could be understood. A classmate had struggled to understand a key point in her contrastive linguistics assignment about Freedom of Speech in the U.S and Vietnam so Tran explained it to her and re-wrote the argument in a clearer way. Kim-Ly did not always find peer assessment as useful because she questioned the proficiency and authority of her peers to assess and correct her work. Kim-Ly wanted a teacher who has a higher level of knowledge, to give her feedback, rather than her peers.
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Research question 3
Which writing processes do the ten students use when writing for university purposes?
Participants were asked to report on the writing processes or stages they went through when completing a recent assignment or piece of writing. Participants also undertook two think aloud writing tasks where they verbalised what they were thinking during the writing process. The first retrospective reports of writing processes were less detailed than the concurrent think aloud protocols. The behaviours and thinking reported were analysed and structured into a pre-writing stage, writing stage and postwriting stage. This approach reflects the L2 writing process tradition and shows the phases of writing. The model in Figure 39 is a visual representation of some of the findings in relation to this research question.
Figure 39. L2 model of writing from retrospective and concurrent think aloud activities.
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The three sections indicate that L2 writing for university purposes starts (somewhere) and finishes (somehow). There is a beginning and an end when it comes to writing an assignment. The processes within this however are not finite because each piece of writing is connected to earlier and later writing activities and other experiences. This is reflected in many actions and thoughts within this model. For example,
conceptualising the task, activating schema and identifying the purpose of the writing and planning content all rely on previous experiences of some kind. These are likely to be earlier experiences of writing for similar tasks or topics in addition to other sociocultural influences. This point is to show that, although writing tasks were generally discussed in isolation within the data collection stages, they were construed very much as part of an ongoing process of writing development and experiences that build on one another. There were many examples where participants clearly used prior learning and experiences of writing within the think aloud tasks.
A second feature of the model is the recursion, which also echoes existing
representations of composing processes, or ‘post-process’ ideas. The mental processes and actions evidenced in writing are often simultaneous, inter-dependent and
nonlinear so at any stage of the writing, participants would probably be engaged in mental processes in what they had already written and what they will do afterwards. Indeed, this fundamental aspect of the writing process makes it difficultly to capture as it happens ‘live’ in the working memory of individuals (Olive, 2012; Olive and Passerault, 2012) The actions and verbalisations are linked in many ways, for example, wanting to achieve cohesion and coherence in writing is linked to
organisation of writing (amongst other things), and this can require textual revisions along the way. Another example is how the process of creating arguments relates to the use of academic register and ideational revisions (to express ideas and meaning intended). These may require compensatory revisions before the writer is satisfied with the argument, and this tends to involve backtracking (a checking over what has been written before to inform what to write next or how).
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Writing processes from retrospective reports of writing
A general process was reported that involved pre-writing and writing stages. MA ELT students and those expected to write research reports reported to have chosen articles and some wanted to find an interesting topic or something different to other students. They undertook some detailed reading, engaged with texts, identified the purpose of the writing, received instructions from the teacher (including how to structure the writing), noted the main ideas (of reading and for assignment). Some reported to have planned for the writing using columns or writing an outline.
Topics, ideas and arguments
Other participants reported to have considered the question or narrowed the topic before turning to materials or data collection. They generally read texts in the form of a course-book, other books or articles (online and hard copies). Some participants said they highlighted parts of the reading and/or made either handwritten or typed notes from their reading. One participant said she tends to copy and past material before paraphrasing the copied texts.
This stage tended to contribute to planning and idea-generation activities. Some participants reported to have formed key points and arguments based on their reading and, (for some), an assessment of the reading. Some participants explained or drew a diagram to show how they tend to plan for assignments. This included using
brainstorming, using bullet points or writing points in columns or creating sentences and paragraphs from notes made of the reading.
Some participants spoke about showing critical thinking skills in their writing. Kim-Ly said she decides whether to agree or disagree with the reading or arguments based on whether the points are well supported by others. Linh and Phuong reported to assess the reliability of research reports based on clarity of the research questions and research-related issues, like any sample bias. Tran found it important to provide strong, logical arguments and avoids using ‘weak’ phrases like ‘in my opinion’. Two MA ELT participants said they thought about how to make their writing interesting or engaging for readers and Phuong used counter-argumentative paragraph structures to