Scaffolding analytical argumentative writing in a design class: A corpus analysis of student writing

• Published in: Linguistics and education Vol. 51; pp. 20 - 30
• Main Authors: Gomez-Laich, Maria Pia, Miller, Ryan T., Pessoa, Silvia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Inc 01.06.2019; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Analytical writing; Collaboration; College students; Corpus analysis; Corpus linguistics; English as a second language; Interdisciplinary collaboration; Scaffolding; Second language writing; Student writing; Writing instruction; Interdisciplinary collaboration; Corpus analysis; Analytical writing
• ISSN: 0898-5898; 1873-1864
• DOI: 10.1016/j.linged.2019.03.003

•Explicit instruction grounded in an SFL-based approach to genre led to improved student writing.•Explicit instruction led to consistent use of specialized, discipline-specific words to frame analyses.•Explicit instruction led to effective integration of external resources to set up an argument. We report on an interdisciplinary collaboration between writing professors with training in linguistics and a design professor at an English-medium university in the Middle East, where the majority of the students have English as an additional language. We briefly describe the iterative process of redesigning the writing assignments and designing writing workshops to make the design professor's expectations more explicit. We then investigate the impact of the explicit instruction and writing workshops on students’ writing. We use a corpus-based tool to compare the writing of students who participated in the workshops to that of students who took the course in a previous semester, when the workshops were not offered. Our analysis points to an improvement in student writing as a result of the disciplinary writing workshops, particularly in the use of linguistic resources to write analytically.