Textual Development in University Students' Writing

摘要

This paper will focus on investigating textuality in English language writing produced by second language learners studying at the tertiary level. In particular, we will focus on how textuality is enhanced through the successive drafts. There is already substantial literature addressing textual features in writing, especially in terms of thematic choices in academic settings (for examples in Berry 1995, Luo 2006, Martin 1995, North 2005, and Whittaker, 1995). The City University of Hong Kong is conducting an English enhancement project called the Language Companion Course (LCC) project. It provides a web-based platform allowing online language specialist coaches to interact with students on designated written assignments. Before finally submitting their essay to the subject teacher, each student will have worked through two prior drafts with their online language specialist coach. Students' written work and the comments from the online language specialist coaches are stored electronically, providing a rich resource for linguistic analysis. In this study, we focus on the development of textuality over one student's successive drafts of written assignments, we find the student demonstrated satisfactory performance.