2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Investigating the Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF) Writing Development of First Year Students Over a School Year
| Project/Area Number |
19K00824
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| Research Institution | Kyushu Institute of Technology |
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Principal Investigator |
Long Robert 九州工業大学, 教養教育院, 教授 (00284589)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2019-04-01 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | Complexity / Accuracy / Fluency / Writing / improvement / curriculum / editing / online grammar checkers |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
For the second year of this grant, Data was collected from only one institution, Hiroshima University, due to issues related to COVID19. Eight participants took part, providing three essays for the year; however, two of these participants sent eight monthly essays, as it was important to look at particular variables and how they changed from month to month over the school year. Again, the issue for writing courses in Japan is that a great deal of money is spent on such programs, yet there is very little coordinated oversight, planning, and evaluation in regard to course curriculum, class management, textbooks, and evaluation. Furthermore, little information is known about Japanese students’ actual skills in L2 composition, and how they improve over a school year. Thus, the procedures for each set of essays, were to have one group of students who will have access to free online writing software (grammarly.com), and the other group who will rely solely on class materials and teacher instructions. It is important to know if free online grammar software can actually help improve writing abilities for students. For the second aim, regarding teachers’ recommendations, a series of interview / discussions were conducted in Hiroshima which were then sent to the researcher. As for the first research question, (a) Is there a significant difference in data for syntactical complexity and for grammatical accuracy between the control groups and treatment groups?, there was a significant difference found in both the first and second drafts.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
COVID19 impacted the number of institutions that wanted to cooperate. All of the essay collection had to be done online / through email.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Research for 2021, includes five institutions in Northern Japan, and China. In Japan, data is being collected in Kanda Institute of Foreign languages, Kyorin University, Gakuin University, Musashino University and in China, Fujian University of Technology. So, a total of 141 participants are taking part, with three essays are being collected.
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| Causes of Carryover |
There were far fewer participants last year due to issues related to COVID. Teachers were too busy preparing for online classes.
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