ERIC Number: EJ1120739
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Dec
Pages: 27
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1056-7941
EISSN: N/A
Where's Your Thesis Statement and What Happened to Your Topic Sentences? Identifying Organizational Challenges in Undergraduate Student Argumentative Writing
Miller, Ryan T.; Pessoa, Silvia
TESOL Journal, v7 n4 p847-873 Dec 2016
The authors examine the challenges students faced in trying to write organized texts using effective thesis statements and topic sentences by analyzing argumentative history essays written by multilingual students enrolled in an undergraduate history course. They use the notions of macro-Theme (i.e., thesis statement) and hyper-Theme (i.e., topic sentence) from systemic functional linguistics to categorize students' challenges constructing effective macro-Themes and hyper-Themes. They compare higher graded essays and lower graded essays at six time points during one semester. Both higher and lower graded essays showed challenges with the fronting, specificity, and consistency of their macro-Themes and hyper-Themes. However, there was improvement over the course of the semester. By identifying these challenges, the authors aim to help teachers and students develop a meta-language to talk about these textual features of academic writing and thus enhance the teaching and writing of academic writing. They call for the need for explicit instruction to enhance students' organization of their ideas.
Descriptors: Undergraduate Students, Academic Discourse, Writing (Composition), Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Teaching Methods, English (Second Language), Persuasive Discourse, Writing Difficulties, Writing Instruction, Linguistics, Essays, Writing Evaluation, Classification, History Instruction
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
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