Team members: Deng Xudong, Lee Kooi Cheng, Chew Moh Leen, Patrick Gallo, Chitra Varaprasad, Wong Jock Onn

This project aims to investigate the impact of an English for Academic Purposes course (i.e. ES5001A: Graduate English Course-Intermediate Level) on the development of academic writing abilities of ESL/EFL graduate students in NUS. More specifically, the project has the following three main aims:

• To investigate the impact of CELC postgraduate EAP course (i.e. ES5001A) on the development of ESL/EFL postgraduate students’ academic writing skills or abilities.
• To examine to what extent CELC postgraduate EAP course has helped postgraduate students with other assignments or research writing.
• To explore what potential benefits other than English language skills the postgraduate EAP course may bring to its students.

To achieve the above three aims, the study compared the essays that students wrote prior to taking the course and after it in terms of grammar accuracy, fluency, academic vocabulary use, and overall essay bands. It managed to collect pre- and post-test essays written by 158 graduate students. In addition, the study also administered a questionnaire to elicit these students’ views on the usefulness of the course for developing their academic writing skills and for writing their other course-work related assignments, as well as on any potential benefits (other than the development of English language skills) that the course may bring to them. Currently, the project has done most of the analyses (including, counting the number of academic vocabulary in each of the 316 scripts, inputting the pre- and post-test bands, counting the number of words and sentences in each of the scripts). One on-going task is the accuracy analysis, which is scheduled to be completed in Mid-August 2011.  The project is supported by a CELC English Language Pedagogy Enhancement Grant.

Team members: Radhika Jaidev, Lee Kit Mun, Lee Ming Cherk, Norhayati Ismail & T. Ruanni F. Tupas

The aim of the study was to explore the perspectives of a group of five undergraduates on their experiences in writing a take-home assignment entitled, ‘Exploring the Singapore River through time” in partial fulfilment of the assessment requirements for a Singapore Studies module, Evolution of a Global City State (SSA 2211), offered by the History Department of the National University of Singapore (Refer App.1 for details of the assignment). SSA 2211 is a 4 modular-credit course and one among a buffet of modules offered by various departments under the Singapore Studies banner to students across years and disciplines in undergraduate degree programmes. The module is assessed based on one written assignment and a final examination and as such the written assignment features significantly in the final grade that a student achieves for this module.

The set assignment for SSA2211 in August 2010, Semester 1 of Academic Year 2010-11, required students to examine historical images of the Singapore River, visit the same scene in the present and then compare their personal observations with the visuals. Most importantly, the assignment required students to critically evaluate the changing role of the Singapore River and its significance for people in Singapore based on the past and present images and their personal observation. Students were given assigned readings to help them with their understanding of the content and critical evaluation of images.

The researchers examined the students’ understanding of the requirements and assessment rubrics of the given task and compared their approaches to writing the responses to the question by bearing the following research questions in mind. The major research question is as follows:

1. What are the different ways in which students understand the requirements and rubrics of the given task?

2. What challenges do the students face when completing the written task?

3. What coping strategies do they apply at various stages of writing the assignment?

Data for this study was mainly derived through a series of four to five semi-structured interviews conducted with the students over the course of the semester with a “planned list of questions” that “allow(ed) room for dialogue, follow-up questions, and other changes,” (Kendall, 2008, p. 133). The choice of this particular type of interviews was made to enable the “exploration of meaning, especially meaning constructed by the research participants regarding a topic of interest. The flexibility and ability to probe with follow-up questions along with the dialogic nature of the interview enables the researcher to attempt to see issues from the perspectives of the interviewee and to achieve a degree of empathy and understanding with research participants ,” (Kendall, 2008. P. 133-134).

Information derived through the interviews was complemented by data obtained from the students’ reflexive journals in which students had been advised to document their approaches to writing the assignment, reasons for those choices as well as their fears and difficulties in implementing those decisions. For a broader understanding of the students’ approaches within the context of the particular assignment brief, the researchers attended the lecture and tutorial during which SSA2211 lecturers and tutors explained and discussed the assignment with their students. Additionally, all the researchers undertaking this study had access to all teaching materials for this module which were posted on the module website of the university’s Integrated Virtual Learning Environment (IVLE). Researchers also had access to the discussion forum for this module which enables them to view students’ questions and comments as well as the module lecturers’ responses to the former. Furthermore, researchers attended the markers’ meeting once the assignment had been submitted to better understand the marking rubrics that the tutors/ assessors would employ when marking the assignments. Finally, all researchers received a marked copy of their student’s assignment with the assessor’s grade and supporting feedback.

It was found that students had differing ways of approaching the writing assignment based on a variety of reasons, including their understanding of the assignment, their valuation of the course either as a regular graded module or as a Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory grade module, the weighting of the task, as well as their perceptions of discipline-specific norms in academic writing. Academic writing, as it emerges from the data, is a complex situated practice shaped by individual students’ calculated and/or critical valuation of the weight and nature of the academic task, as well as their understanding of what it means to analyze or evaluate in academic writing. 

Researcher: Lee Ming Cherk

The learning of grammar rules does not necessarily lead to accurate grammar use. To enable ESL learners to write grammatically and edit their own writing independently, an eclectic approach is adopted to teach grammar use in context.

This project aims to

• evaluate the efficacy of this eclectic approach in helping students become more aware of grammar rules for ESL writing; and
• investigate the relative effectiveness of each method in raising grammar awareness in students.

Since progress in achieving grammatical accuracy was used as an indicator of growing grammar awareness, the study compared the rates of errors for different essay drafts, as well as the pre-course and post-course grammar tests of discrete grammar items. In addition, the relative effectiveness of each method was determined by conducting a questionnaire survey.

The subjects of this study were 48 students who took the ES1102 English for Academic Purposes module in semester 1 of the 2010/2011 academic year. The majority of them (79.2%) were either Singaporeans or permanent residents who had undergone the Singapore education system, while the rest (20.8%) were Malaysian, Chinese, Vietnamese or Indonesian students who had joined NUS after completing high school in their respective home countries. This group of students also came from various disciplines of study: Arts and Social Sciences, Business, Design and the Environment, Engineering and Science.

The results show that this eclectic approach enabled students to make statistically significant improvement in grammar accuracy, and helped them move along a developmental continuum. Although they responded favorably to all the methods (i.e. teacher feedback, text editing exercises, presentation of grammar items, error coding, online grammar exercises), they tended to prefer the more structured, teacher-directed methods over the self-directed ones.

Aim: To investigate the preferences and nature of students social network behaviour and learning.
Method: Survey, interviews and social network accounts analysis
Duration: over two semesters from August 2011.
The project is supported by a CDTL Teaching Enhancement Grant.
Description written by: Jeffrey Mok

Description: This research project seeks to extend the learning space onto the virtual environment of the facebook and in so doing enhances the learning and teaching continuum that the students and teacher has when the course begins. In short, once the course starts with the extended social classroom space, the learning and teaching does not stop when the class ends. This continual and extended learning space facilitates the interactive teaching and learning notion into allowing more and deeper levels of student and teacher interaction and peer learning. This extended social space will be hosted on facebook, where students are already frequenting. Pedagogically, the notion of social learning of Vygotskian social-cultural theory of learning is extended onto a social and cultural media platform. The research will look at the affective dimension  and learning preferences of the participants towards having a course with the facebook as an extension. Equally critical are the insights into the reasons for students’ preference to social media for learning and what makes an effective social media extension to a regular teaching course.

Team members: Jessie Teng, Priscillia Pui, Yang Ying, Zhu Shenfa.

The existing grammar textbooks in the market have been found to be unsuitable for PRC scholars coming into NUS as undergraduates, such as the SM3 students. Since such students often still have problems with accuracy in various grammar areas despite having had years of grammar instruction, there is a need to develop grammar materials that will better cater to their needs. This project aims to identify the PRC SM3 students’ specific areas of need in grammar so that course materials targeted at addressing these grammar needs can be developed and used. To achieve these aims, a needs analysis was first conducted to determine the areas of focus for the course materials. The materials were then developed and trialed in the course. Coding of grammar errors made was done on the students’ Pre Test and Post Test essay scripts. A survey was also conducted on both tutors and students to elicit feedback on the course materials used.

Coding of 149 Pre- and Post-Test scripts showed mixed results in terms of improvement in various grammar areas. However, two surveys administered respectively to students and tutors garnered positive responses, showing that the grammar materials were appropriate in meeting the needs of the students, useful in generating awareness of grammar and in helping the students identify and correct their own errors and preferred by tutors over grammar textbooks. In analyzing student needs and creating materials based on the identified needs using authentic student grammar errors, the course materials have achieved the objective of addressing various grammar needs of SM3 students, as evidenced by the generally positive feedback from both tutors and students.

The project was supported by a CDTL Teaching Enhancement Grant.