Impact of teacher characteristics on science writing education

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 17K03004
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Foreign language education
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: Terashima Alexandra 東京大学, 教養学部, 特任講師 (80632877)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): MCEOWN KRISTOPHE 早稲田大学, 理工学術院, 准教授(任期付) (00794306) ; 片山 晶子 東京大学, 教養学部, 特任講師 (10622805) ; MANINANG JOHN 東京大学, 教養学部, 特任講師 (40777843) ; ローランド ダグラス 早稲田大学, 理工学術院, 准教授(任期付) (60749290) ; 野沢 恵美子 中央大学, 法学部, 准教授 (70755777) ; HALLMAN CANDLER 東京大学, 教養学部, 特任講師 (70761435)
• Project Period (FY): 2017-04-01 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: education / motivation / learner corpus / academic writing / corpus analysis / focus groups / teacher characteristics

Outline of Final Research Achievements

For the past three years our aim was to gain insights into the impact a teacher’s academic background has on student motivation and learning outcomes in a 13-week academic writing course in an L2 context (ESP). We succeeded in writing and validating a questionnaire which assessed student motivation over the course of the semester, we established a framework for conductive qualitative analysis of teacher beliefs and how those influence classroom practices and we established and preliminarily analyzed a corpus of student papers. This learner corpus is unique because it is a collection of IMRD-style papers written by undergraduate students whose first language is Japanese.

Free Research Field

Foreign language education

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

We studied whether teachers’ disciplinary backgrounds influence their teaching and student motivation. Our findings should enable English writing courses in Japan to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach, and to incorporate the characteristics of teachers into curriculum design.