Development and Application of a Concept Mapping-based Academic Writing Instruction Model for Students Majoring in Science and Engineering

Development and Application of a Concept Mapping-based Academic Writing Instruction Model for Students Majoring in Science and Engineering

This study aimed to investigate the effect of concept mapping-based academic writing instruction for science and engineering students. Also, this study examined whether there was a relationship between the effect of concept mapping-based instruction and English proficiency and whether there was an effect of concept mapping-based writing instruction on the improvement of writingcomponents. 84 students participated in this study and were classified into either an experiment group or a control group. A pre-writing task was administered to both groups before concept mapping-based instruction was given to the experimental group. After ten week concept mapping-based instruction, a post-writing task was administered to both groups. The outcomes of the pre-writing task and the post-writing task were analyzed using T-unit measure and a rubric for academic writing. The results showed that there was no effect of concept mapping-based academic writing instruction when writing tasks were analyzed by T-units, but that there was an effect of concept mapping-based writing instruction when writing performance was measured by the writing rubric. This study also found that concept mapping-based writing instruction did support improvements of the low-level English proficiency group in terms of sentence number and accuracy as well as organization and coherence. Furthermore, this study revealed the high-level English proficiency group can have benefits in content while the low- level English proficiency group can have benefits in structure, content as well as grammar/ mechanics. Pedagogical implications and directions of further research were discussed.