Effects of Computer-supported Contrasting Models Approach on Raising Students' Awareness about the Concept of Coherence in Written Text

This study explored the effectiveness of a web-based contrasting models approach in raising students' awareness of important features essential for well-written English compositions. Due to their limited linguistic knowledge and English writing skills, English as a second language (ESL) students tend to pay too much attention to lower-order problems related to grammar or words, attending little to higher-level aspects of writing such as coherence in their writing process. Coupled with the abstractness of the concepts of many features such as flow, mastering writing skills is oftentimes perceived as unattainable. In order to assist ESL students in conceptualizing a wide range of features in the entire writing process, the Contrasting Models (CM) approach was developed as an on-line self-study instruction and consisted of one set of good and weak writing models, text analysis tasks, and self-evaluation activities. By categorizing the features necessary for writing into general features (e.g. grammar) and important features (e.g. coherence), this study compared the learning outcome of the CM approach with that of the Good Model Only (GO) approach, a prevailing instructional method presenting good writing models to students. Evidently, CM students outperformed GO students, identifying more important features and using cohesive devices. The study presents specific aspects of instructional design that can guide even less competent ESL writers to higher-order tasks, which would eventually improve the quality of writing.