Evaluating the effectiveness of a cross-disciplinary genre-focused writing intervention
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Date
Authors
Carstens, Adelia
Fletcher, Lizelle
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
South African Asociation for Language Teaching
Abstract
In tertiary education settings it is imperative for students to move confidently between the academic discourses of a variety of disciplines. Thus, it is merited to aim writing interventions at genres that straddle disciplinary boundaries. Following a survey on preferred genres and text types at the University of Pretoria an essay-writing intervention for second-year undergraduate students was designed and developed. The effectiveness of the intervention was evaluated using a pretest-posttest design. On
average the scores of the respondents improved by 7%. The largest improvement was on structure and development (15%), followed by the use of source materials (10%) and academic writing style (7%). An interpretation of the findings, combined with feedback from the respondents, suggested that extensive writing should be introduced soon after the commencement of an essay-writing intervention, and that a series of shorter teaching and learning cycles might be more effective than a single cycle. Furthermore, study units dealing with making and supporting claims might focus more strongly on learning from models than on explicit teaching of a variety of disciplinary conventions and preferences.
Description
Keywords
Academic essay, Genre (Literature)
Sustainable Development Goals
Citation
Carstens, A & Fletcher, L 2009, 'Evaluating the effectiveness of a cross-disciplinary genre-focused writing intervention', Journal for Language Teaching / Tydskrif vir Taalonderrig, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 54-65. [http://www.ajol.info/journal_index.php?jid=37&ab=jlt]