A New Training Workshop for Students’ IELTS Exam Mastering

Journal of Education and Practice, 2013

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of the genre-based approach to teaching report-writing based on graphical data to pre-university students. It employed a mixed method approach where data were gathered using quantitative and qualitative method. The quantitative data was aimed at obtaining information on the effect of the genre-based report writing training based on the performance of students in whereas the qualitative data was obtained to elicit respondents' opinions on report writing from graphical data. The sample consisted of 62 Form Six students who were studying English for university entry known as Malaysian University English Test (MUET). The English proficiency of the students is generally of low to average level. Most of them are of Dusun and Bajau ethnics background, of Sabah, Malaysia. Findings from the study showed that there is significant difference between the experimental and the control groups in terms of organization, development of ideas and vocabulary. Analysis of the students' responses to the open-ended questions seems to indicate that vocabulary is still the main problems students faced in writing the reports. Conclusions drawn from the findings of the study imply that the Genre-based approach to writing structure of a four-stage training cycle, namely the context exploration, text exploration, joint construction, and the individual application stages adapted from Derewianka (1990) and Butt et al (2001) do assist these learners to gain control of the report-writing genre.

Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2021

2012

With the advent of computing and the Internet, language teachers have been given a new tool that could be used in English language teaching classrooms. However, the use of technology is showing its drawbacks and the biggest one is definitely the sense of deja vu. Students too often use the Internet to find already made solutions for their take-homeassignments and simply copy-paste them. In order to battle plagiarism (more) successfully, we decided to have our students do one of their tasks in the computer lab during class. It was believed that doing this task in the lab would also increase student motivation and encourage peer correction and cooperation. This paper will present the results of using web-based materials with first-year, second-semester students of Tourism, enrolled in the course “English in Tourism II” at the Faculty of Economics, University of Split.

ELT Worldwide, 2019

This Research was designed to improve the students’ ability in writing by Describing pictures.The problem of the research was “can describing pictures improve students’ ability in writing?”. There were many kinds of strategies that could be used in teaching writing, but in this research, the researcher applied only describing pictures, and writing activities focusing on the kinds of activities. The design of this research was Collaborative Classroom Action Research (CAR). Based on the analytical scoring rubric showed that from 63 in the first cycle and got increased to 73 in the second cycle. In the first cycle there were 13 Students of 30 students could reach the minimum score or only 43 % students were success. While in the last cycle there were 27 Students of 30 students could reach even greater that the minimum score or 90% students were success.Based on the conclusion of this research the researcher suggests some points. Firstly, describing pictures could be employed to improve...

The recent emphasis on the importance of English language teaching and learning in public universities in Pakistan has resulted in the introduction of a new English as Second Language (ESL) programme including revised textbooks. The textbooks contains, among others, many exercises and activities which require learners to comprehend graphs, charts, diagrams and maps (hereafter ‘graphs’ will be used to refer to all of these terms). This paper examines the impact of students’ learning experiences of biology or maths subjects at the intermediate level (the A-level equivalent in Pakistan) in relation to their graph comprehension in the ESL textbooks in the first year of university. With a qualitative case study approach, the findings of this study are based on observations and interviews with purposively sampled seventeen students and four teachers from a public university located in the province of Sindh, Pakistan. The findings suggest that students’ previous learning experiences conflict with the graph based exercises in the ESL textbooks. When interacting with these exercises, students constructed their identities as ‘medical’ or ‘engineering’ students; underperformance in graph comprehension is explained in relation to being a medical student (and therefore from a biology background), while good performance is attributed to being an engineering student (and therefore from a maths background). These findings have implications for the course designers, teacher training and future researchers.

International Journal of Instruction

The present study aimed at investigating whether academic IELTS candidates perform differently in writing on either a chart topic or a table topic of the IELTS writing task 1 with regard to the four IELTS writing marking criteria i.e. task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammar range and accuracy. The study adopted a mixed methods approach. To this end, 45 candidates participated in the study. In the beginning, the participants were asked to write on a chart topic of the IELTS writing task 1. After 10 days, the same groups of participants were given a table topic of the IELTS writing task 1. All their papers were then marked and analyzed quantitatively in accordance with IELTS writing task 1 descriptor. Next, paired-samples statistical analyses were run to find out how they performed. The results revealed that the participants' writing performance on a chart topic was significantly higher than a table topic in terms of task achievement, lexical resource, and grammar range and accuracy scores. Concerning the qualitative side of this study, there was a significant difference between candidates' performance in chart and table topics with respect to task achievement and lexical resource. However, the results did not manifest any significant differences between candidates' performance getting chart and table prompts in terms of coherence, cohesion, and grammar range and accuracy.

Foreign Languages & Literature Department, National Cheng Kung University, 2013

International Education Studies

The aim of this study is to determine the scope validity of the graph drawing interpretation skill checklist that can be used in social studies teaching. The literature review was made while the draft skill checklist was prepared at first. There have generally been some graph drawing and interpretation skill checklist studies at secondary and higher education levels. However, a graph drawing and interpretation skill checklist prepared for the social studies course at the primary education level has not been found. In the next step, items of the graph drawing and interpretation skill checklist were prepared. It has been benefitted from the literature on the graph drawing and interpretation for this. Attention has been paid to the preparation of items that assess the graph drawing and interpretation skill at the elementary education level. The scope validity of the items was analyzed employing the technique developed by Lawshe (1975) based on assessments of 10 specialists in their fie...