| Author: | Mok, Carmen Ming-yee |
| Title: | An exploratory study of interactive writing with a Hong Kong secondary English class |
| Degree: | M.A. |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Subject: | English language -- Composition and exercises -- Study and teaching (Secondary) -- China -- Hong Kong Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of English |
| Pages: | viii, 105 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Writing at school in Hong Kong is largely devoted to reinforcing writing skills and grammatical structures. Students are unaware that written English could be a powerful means of communication. Interactive writing was implemented in many studies in Britain and the USA in which favourable results were reported. This study asks to what extent this would be true in Hong Kong where English is used minimally both inside and outside school. This paper is concerned with experimenting with interactive writing with a class of forty secondary two students. The subjects were invited to communicate with the researcher who was in Canada through letter writing over a period of five months. A sample of student letters as school work was also collected for analysis. By providing the students with a real need to write and an audience, the letters to the researcher were found to be more versatile in terms of structure, ideas and lexical richness than the letters written at school. Writing interactively in English appeared to be a novelty to the subjects but they were able to produce interactive discourse in their subsequent letters. There was also a voluntary increase of length in the letters of the selected students. The study here shows how interactive letter writing could be used to create an unthreatening and relaxing context for the students to acquire interactive writing in English and to discover how written English could be used as an effective means of communication. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| b12465331.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 3.38 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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