Social constructionist approaches to teaching technical writing: A case study of Thai college students.

摘要

This qualitative research study investigates the implementation of social-constructionist approaches to teaching writing in an English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) technical writing class at a university in Thailand. Thirty sophomore science majors at Burapha University participated in this research during a period of one semester (4 months). The teaching approaches used were collaboration, collaborative writing, writing as a process, peer review, teacher/student writing conference, and peer evaluation. The data were obtained through participants' reflections and feedback written as self-reports, researchers' observation, inspection of the documents, and interviews. The findings indicate that the implementation of social constructionist approaches to teaching writing have useful results. Through collaboration and collaborative writing, less-proficient EFL writers learned a great deal from more-proficient EFL writers. All participants learned mainly through observation and discussion. The major problems in collaborative writing were related to participants' accountability and responsibility, group work management, and the evaluation of participants in collaborative writing. Their writing process is similar to those of native English writers. However, their lack of competence in English grammar and vocabulary forced them to compose in the Thai language first and later to translate their texts into English. The revisions were mostly done at a sentence level. Participants benefited more from having a chance to look at their peers' works than from their peers' comments because the students were not confident in giving comments to each other. Student/teacher writing conferences were liked, but participants wanted more time and wanted to discuss their general learning problems, not just corrections to the assignments. Participants liked the writing assignments because they could practice writing documents that were related to their own fields. However, the course content appears to have been inadequate. Participants stated that they wanted the course to cover more content that would have allowed them to practice not only English writing, but also speaking, listening, and reading. For the evaluation, participants wanted a more tangible approach to measuring their ability. Judging them from the writing products alone was not considered valid. They suggested using exams along with the evaluation of writing assignments as a method for evaluation.