provided. The organization of the present study is also included.

Chapter One Introduction

The introductory chapter consists of seven parts. First, the background and

motivation are presented. Next, the purpose of the study and the research questions

and hypotheses are addressed. Then, the significance and the definition of terms are

provided. The organization of the present study is also included.

1.1 Background and Motivation

The main reasons of conducting this present study are that English writing appears

to be a challenging task for senior high school students in Taiwan and that few studies

about the effects of the story-mapping instruction on English story writing have been

conducted in Taiwan. In the following part, the difficulty of English writing to EFL

learners, the reasons for focusing on prewriting phase, story writing and picture

writing, and the adoption of the story-mapping instruction will be presented.

1.1.1 The Difficulty of English Writing to EFL Writers

Learning to write is a complex matter. Research on how students master writing

indicates that, to become independent writers, they must learn to orchestrate many

different types of knowledge to create a successful story (Dyson, 1989; Clay, 1998).

Kroll (1990) points out that writing is a difficult skill for any language user, which is

to say that writing presents a fairly challenging task for both native and nonnative

speakers. According to Byrne (1988), writing is difficult for L1 learners for two main

reasons. First, it is a solitary activity, lacking interaction and feedback from others.

Besides, it requires complicated linguistic knowledge. For EFL learners, writing

appears to be a rather challenging and frustrating task since it involves cultural and

linguistic differences, background knowledge about the topic, writing apprehension,

time limit, the knowledge of writing process, etc. Tribble (1996) also points out that to

be a good writer, a learner must possess content knowledge, context knowledge,

language system knowledge and writing process knowledge as well. No doubt English

writing has been considered a laborious and troublesome task to many EFL learners.

In the EFL learning environment in Taiwan, English writing has been

troublesome to most senior high school students. According to Li (1992), a large

majority of high school graduates failed English writing in JCEE (Joint College

Entrance Examination), for they had no idea what to write. Every year, a large

percentage of English composition scores on the college entrance range between 6 to

zero points, out of the total score of 20. Although English instructors have tried to

promote senior high school students’ writing ability, students still have been

performing poorly in English writing. It is frustrating for both teachers and students

that over 20,000 senior high students scored zero in the English composition of the

picture-writing form each year from 2003 to 2005. It is striking that almost one-fifth

of the exam-takers have difficulty writing a story with the aid of pictures after

undergoing at least 6 years of formal English instruction. According to Chen (1992),

many students here in Taiwan feel tortured by English writing and have problems

expressing their ideas and feelings in English. Thus, the present study aims to suggest

the story mapping strategy to help beginning EFL writers have a positive attitude

toward English writing and improve their writing performance by providing them

with a concrete concept of story structure.

1.1.2 Focus on Prewriting Phase

The reason that the present study focuses on the prewriting phase rather than

other phases of writing process, such as editing and revising, is that the prewriting

phase is regarded as the most crucial stage of writing (Tompkins, 1990; Routman,

1991; Graves, 1994). During the prewriting stage, writers can generate most of their

ideas and construct the basic structure of the content. Yet, one of the characteristics of

students’ poor performance in writing is that they do not plan before writing; they

simply write whatever comes to their mind, or have difficulties finding enough to say.

Charney, Newman, & Palmquist (1995) indicate that the problem of having nothing to

write results in writing anxiety. The kind of writing anxiety has a negative influence

not only on the writing performance but also on their attitude and motivation toward

writing. To EFL students, the feeling of not being able to express them in the target

language leads to depression, frustration and apprehension in writing (Chiang, 2003).

Lacking appropriate prewriting activities results in not only poor English writing but

also the writing apprehension. Noyce & Christie (1989) suggest that during the

prewriting stage, ideas for writing are generated by exploring new information or

prior knowledge through activities that encourage a free flow of thought. Through

such experience, learners discover they have something to say when they write.

Brainstorming, clustering, outlining or mapping helps students to decide what to write

about and how to go about it. Without prewriting activities, composition classes

would turn out to be a source of frustration for lots of students. Noyce & Christie also

point out that learners need to engage in talking, picturializing and planning before

beginning to write. Writing can be an enjoyable activity for most students if they have

the knowledge and strategies they need to facilitate the process. Additionally, Ellis

(2003) indicates that writing process would be easy and unproblematic for students if

they possess the knowledge of the structure of writing. The aim of the present study is

to provide a prewriting strategy, the story mapping instruction, to cope with the

problem of not knowing what to write and to find out if it can reduce the writing

apprehension.

1.1.3 Focus on Story Writing and Picture Writing

The present study focuses on the story writing instead of other genres because

compared to other genres, stories appear to be relatively easier and more common and

interesting to students. Stories are probably the first to be acquired at home and the

most exploited in the early stage of learning in school (Cortazzi, 1994). Additionally,

Tompkins (1982) suggests that beginning writers should write stories in order to (1)

entertain, (2) foster artistic expression, (3) explore the functions and values of writing,

(4) stimulate imagination, (5) clarify thinking, (6) search for identity, and (7) learn to

read and write.

There are two reasons that the study focuses on picture writing. One is that

picture aids can help students in producing a better-organized story structure,

generating a richer content (Sinatra, 1973; Stewig, 1980; Hyerle, 1996; McGarrey,

1999; Chiang, 2003), evoking students’ imagination (Sarkar, 1978; Stewig, 1980;

Chiang, 2003) and reducing their writing anxiety (Lee, 1994; Chiang, 2003;). The

other is that picture writing is the writing trend of local writing examination. For

example, the writing tests of GEPT (General English Proficiency Test) and the

composition section of JCEE recent years (2004-2006) are picture writing. So, the

goal of the present study is to investigate if the implication of the story mapping

instruction to picture writing helps enhance the participants’ story writing

performance.

The present study adopted three sequential pictures without providing the picture

of ending. According to Tseng (2002), who investigated the effectiveness of picture

writing on Chinese writing, the number of given pictures makes a great difference in

students’ story writing. The more pictures that the teacher provides, the better the

students’ writing performance will be since they provide more writing materials and

background information. Based on the model of JCEE, whose picture writing includes

3 sequential pictures, the present study aims to see if the students could come up with

a logical and reasonable ending without the picture aid of “Ending.”

1.1.4 Adoption of the Story-Mapping Instruction

In this present study, the researcher would like to investigate if story mapping,

one of the prewriting activities, is a workable prewriting strategy to enhance the

narrative writing ability of students when presented with pictures. Many researchers

suggest different graphic organizers to helps language learners. For example, Hyerle

(1996), who designed various kinds of “Thinking Maps”

to assist K-12 students

generate their ideas, indicates that graphic representations can make students turn

abstract ideas into concrete words, concentrate on learning, build vocabulary, and

consequently, they think and write better. Since story mapping, one of the graphic

1

Hyerle (1996) suggested 8 “Thinking Maps”, including 1) Circle Map, which helps defines words or

things in context and presents point of view, 2) Bubble Maps, which describes emotional, sensory, and

logical qualities, 3) Double Bubble Map, which compares and contrasts qualities, 4) Tree Map, which

shows the relationships between main ideas and supporting details, 5) Flow Map, which shows events

as a sequence, 6) Multi-Flow Map, which shows the causes and effects and helps predict outcomes, 7)

Brace Maps, which shows physical structures and part-whole relationships, and 8) Bridge Map, which

helps to transfer or form analogies and metaphors.

organizers, allows learners to turn their ideas and concepts into a graphic

representation of the story structure and assists inexperienced writers in organizing

their story writing, learners will have more confidence in writing and write more

organized compositions through the story-mapping instruction. According to Ruddell

(2004), there are many advantages of writing from story maps. First, it is relatively

easy. Second, mapping is an organizational activity. It is therefore natural to provide

visual representation of students’ constructions and organizations of knowledge from

a learning event before asking students to write. It is hoped that story mapping can

help students develop their thinking process and encourage them to produce longer,

more detailed, coherent and cohesive texts, which in turn enhance linguistic

confidence in students.

1.2 Purpose of the Study

The main purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of story mapping on

picture writing in a second-year senior high school EFL classroom. To be more

specific, by providing the story-mapping strategy as a prewriting activity, the present

study aims to explore how EFL students can benefit from the story-mapping

instruction in terms of their story writing skills and writing performance. The

researcher proposes that with the help of story mapping instruction, which provides a

visual concept of basic story elements, the students are capable of writing

well-organized stories. Moreover, it is also the researcher’s purpose to study how the

story mapping instruction, being integrated into story writing in a language classroom,

engages students and thus reduces their writing apprehension.

1.3 Research Questions

The present study attempts to study effects of the story-mapping strategy on

picture writing; that is, to see how the strategy can influence the students in four

aspects, including writing performance, story writing skills, writing apprehension, and

students’ response to the story-mapping instruction as well. The research addresses

the following questions:

1. Can the story-mapping instruction help students compose longer stories

receiving the story-mapping instruction?

2. Do the participants have better content and organization in their

compositions after receiving the story-mapping instruction?

3. Do the participants write more story elements after receiving the

story-mapping instruction?

4. Do the participants write with more details of story elements after the

story-mapping instruction?

5. Which story elements are the most difficult for the participants? And which

are the easiest for them?

6. Do the participants reduce their writing apprehension after receiving the

story-mapping instruction?

7. What are the participants’ responses toward learning the strategy of story

mapping in writing?

1.4 Research Hypotheses

Based on the previous research questions, the following three research

hypotheses are tested in the present study:

1. The learners who undergo the story-mapping instruction improve

significantly in the content and organization of their writing.

2. The learners who undergo the story-mapping instruction improve

significantly in their story writing skills.

3. The learners who undergo the story-mapping instruction write with less

anxiety and with more confidence.

4. The learners who undergo the story-mapping instruction have a more positive

attitude toward English writing.

1.5 Significance of the Study

To the best of our knowledge, no research here in Taiwan has been conducted to

investigate the effects of using story mapping on the beginning EFL writers to

enhance their English picture writing ability. Chiang (2003) reported the effectiveness

of picture writing on EFL writing. The results showed that with the help of pictures,

the English writing performance of the students improved. However, according to the

researcher’s observation and the outcomes of the JCEE writing test, it is found that

many students were still tortured by doing picture writing in English. It is a pity that

no research has been conducted to cope with the problem. There is research reporting

the positive effects of applying story mapping to English writing (Ford, 1990;

Montague & Graves, 1993; Vallecorsa & deBettencourt, 1997; Hagood, 1997; Roth,

2000; Cannizzar & Coelho, 2002). In Taiwan, there is some research done to

investigate the effect of story mapping applied on elementary, junior school students

about their reading comprehension or writing ability in Chinese (Hsu, 2001; Yeh,

2002; Chang, 2003). It is a pity that little research in Taiwan investigates the effects of

the story-mapping instruction on English story writing. Inspired by the positive effects

of the story-mapping instruction on the Chinese writing, the researcher would like to

provide a concrete writing strategy and some pedagogical implications for EFL

English writing instructors to teach picture writing. Moreover, it is hoped that this

study, which applies story-mapping instruction as a prewriting activity and story

schema, will provide a practical prewriting strategy for senior high school students in

Taiwan to improve their English picture writing. With the view to improving EFL

beginning writers’ story writing performance, the researcher suggests the

story-mapping instruction be a prewriting activity so as to elicit more ideas and

content in their compositions since story mapping provides visual concreteness for

active engagement.

Since there is no related research done to investigate the effects of story mapping

on English writing in senior high school here in Taiwan, the study will be a pioneering

research in Taiwan. If the story mapping proves to be a workable strategy for teachers

to use in helping students to write narratives, additional studies can be duplicated or

conducted with other designs to study more influence in different aspects. By doing so,

this present study will make some contribution or enlightenment to English writing

instruction in Taiwan.

1.6 Definition of Terms

The terms adopted in the present study are defined as follows:

Story Grammar:

A story grammar is the framework for the narrative that specifies the parts or

elements of the story and their temporal and casual relationships. In present study, the

researcher adopted the story grammar units in Harris & Graham (1992), which

contains the following eight categories of story elements: the main character(s), the

locale, the time, the starter event, the goal, the action(s), the ending, and the reaction.

Story Mapping:

Story mapping is a visual demonstration of story grammar, which provides the

framework of a narrative and similar, predictable story elements within a narrative.

A story map can be used as frameworks for storytelling or retelling, and as outlines

for story writing.

Prewriting:

Prewriting is the stage of writing process in which the writer generates ideas and

thoughts.

Schema:

A scheme is an abstract knowledge structure which specifies how a number of

concepts relate to one another. Schemata are used to process new or incoming

information by connecting it with existing knowledge. Once a schema is activated,

attention is focused on discerning the components related to that schema (Pressley &

McCormick, 1995)

Metacognition:

Metacognition means becoming consciously aware of the thinking processes and

taking “strategic control over them” (Lytle & Botel, 1988). Advocates of

metacognitive learning strategies assume that learning processes such as thinking,

problem solving, and comprehension can be analyzed and clustered into distinct

information-processing procedures and that these procedures can be applied to

effective instructional practice (Glaser & Takanishi, 1986).

Writing Apprehension:

An uncomfortable and even fearful experience toward writing, which leads to

difficulties in composition process.

SLWAT:

The Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test developed by Daly and Miller

(1975a).

1.7 Organization of the Study

The study aims to investigate the effects of story-mapping instruction on picture

writing. In Chapter One, the background, motivation, purpose, research questions,

research hypotheses, significance of the study, and definition of terms have been

presented. Chapter Two introduces the literature reviews on the prewriting strategies,

the picture writing trend and the theory of story mapping. Chapter Three presents

the experimental design, the participants, setting, teaching procedures, data collection,

instrument, raters, and data analysis procedures, etc. In Chapter Four, major findings

and discussions are elaborated. Finally, in Chapter Five, the researcher presents the

conclusions, pedagogical implications, and suggestions for future research.