4. Results
4.6 Research Question Six…
4.6.6 The Writing Process
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(From the 1st paired interview with Connie & Tina, May 4th, 2010)
Clearly, Tina and Ice were more independent learners, who preferred to take things into their own hands, while the other two were more like cooperative learners, who liked to get outside help. Their personality trait determined how they developed their individual writing process in this writing class.
From the researcher’s observation, these four participants also had some other features that made them different from each other. Connie was the hardworking type because she always spent long hour working on revision. Tina seemed absent-minded, but she had her own perspective on learning. Sherry saw writing as a fun thing
because she never got tired of making revisions. Contrary to these girl students, Ice didn’t’ have such enthusiasm for English. He took this course out of pragmatic purpose. Unlike these three girls, who also took English classes or write English essays in cram school, Ice only received English education at school. Besides, Ice was not so willing to spend more time studying English as these three girls, so he never wrote outside the school. Ironically, his essays were often the best of all because he was so good at content and organization that his essays were very logical. It appears that enthusiasm doesn’t guarantee the success in this writing class. Some were born writers, while others might only make limited progress.
4.6.6 The Writing Process
Concerning the thinking progress, two matters will be covered: whether participants re-read what they had written while drafting and the new “thinking in English.”
Raimes (1985) found that writers often re-read their drafts to try out possible ideas. Re-reading what they had written was seen as a way of “paying attention to
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what is still vague and unclear (Perl, 1984). In this study, whether these four
participants would re-read what they had written was investigated. When asked if they often re-read their draft while writing, all of them gave a positive answer except Sherry. When asked why, Ice and the other two girls said that they re-read in order to make sure the next sentence was closely connected with the previous one. Instead, Sherry seldom re-read what she had written. Different from others, she read old essays on the blog for inspiration if she had problems thinking up the next sentence.
The habit of re-reading explained why Ice’s essays were well-organized while Sherry’s were rich in content but loose in structure.
One last thing worthy of note is the new emergence of “thinking in English.”
Leki (1990) summarized that “the shifting to L1 can be a very useful strategy for generating ideas and stimulating more complex thinking in L2.” When asked if they translated ideas from L1 to L2, they admitted that they did think up the content in Chinese first and translated their thoughts into English later. However, in the middle of the semester, the percentage of translation decreased but thinking in English increased. The percentages of “thinking in English” in these participants were said to range from 30-50% respectively. It is suggested that the new “thinking in English”
results from the constant writing practice and large exposure to English content. With a large amount of vocabulary input through extensive readings in regular English classes and the constant writing practice in this class, it seems that the second language acquisition was starting to be internalized and integrated in their mind.
However, a further study is still needed to verify which acting factor brings “thinking in English” into play.
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CHAPTER FIVE DISCUSSION
This study discovered a series of findings by answering the six research questions. Basically structured on the major findings in Chapter Four, the chapter is divided into four sections. First, the findings are summarized and discussed, and then the pedagogical implications are provided. Later, the limitations of this study and recommendations for further studies are also discussed.
5. 1 Summary of the Findings and Discussion
The blog-mediated process writing class was mainly instructed through the process writing model (pre-writing, drafting, revising/editing and publishing), coupled with process writing related activities or tools (brainstorming, self-reflection journal, peer review and portfolio) in the mediation of blog. Based on the abundance of data gathered from the blog-mediated process writing class, this case study investigated the following: 1) types of changes these students made in the multiple revisions in the blog-mediated process writing class, 2) how these four EFL 12th graders developed their writing ability in a semester-long blog-mediated process writing class, 3) how the blog helped them in each step of process writing model, 4) what the challenges they faced and what teacher support they would need, 5) their attitude toward writing, and 6) other findings derived from the blog-mediated process writing class in term of the context.
5.1.1 Research Question One
From the revision analysis, this researcher came up with the two following
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findings: the tendency to decrease and the revision preference. First, the tendency to decrease showed which revision was the center of attention. For example, a sharp drop in the tendency to decrease between two revisions showed that the writer’s attention decreased as the number of revision increased. To be more specifically, these four participants made the most changes in R1, less changes in R2 and the least changes in R3. Moreover, the tendency to decrease in the multiple revisions also implied how many revisions were tolerable to these EFL writers. Second, the revision preference divided them into two types of writers: bold writers and conservative writers. Bold writers preferred making changes in the four categories while conservative writers favored making surface or stylistic changes.
The finding concerning the tendency to decrease in the multiple revisions seemed to be quite contrary to Yagelski’s finding that his L1 writers made more changes in R2 than in R1. However, the difference between the two studies required a closer examination. In Yagelski’s study, R1 was made according to the peers’
feedback while R2 was made based on the teacher’s feedback. Since students tended to value the teacher’s feedback more highly (Hu, 2005; Jacob et al., 1998; Tsui & Ng, 2000), it was not unexpected that they made more changes in R2. On the contrary, R1 in this study was made based on the teacher’s feedback on the drafts plus the
suggestions from a peer review. The combination of two kinds of feedback logically explained why the four participants made most changes in R1. In a sense, the total numbers of these multiple revisions in these two studies couldn’t be compared because students in these two studies had different types of revision reference.
The finding of revision preference was also contrary to Yagelski’s study (1995), whose L1 writers tended to make more surface (31%) and stylistic (50.7%) changes than structural (4.2%) and content (14.1%) changes. However, in this study, the four participants fell into two types of writers: the conservative writers, who preferred
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making surface and stylistic changes and bold writers, who favored making four types of changes. Since the numbers of participants and revision inYagelski’s study
outnumbered those in the present study (Yagelski: 21 students with 154 revisions; this study: 4 students with 48 revisions), it was not surprising that Yagelski noticed the existence of a trend that most students favored making surface and stylistic changes.
If more cases were covered in this present study, it might be likely that the researcher also came up with the same result as found by Yagelski.