Examining Students' Perceived Learning and Satisfaction in a Technical English Writing Course

Abstract

In Taiwan, EMI instruction has gradually become more and more common in both undergraduate and graduate courses, with the aims to meet international students' learning needs and to enhance Taiwanese students' English competence. Technical Writing, a course designed to instruct students to produce industry-related analyses, is often regarded as challenge due to its nature as technical reports. Furthermore, students often feel intimidated by the difficulty level of such a course. To take the students step by step in acquiring the necessary structures and composition skills for producing three different genres of technical writing, this study employed the framework of collaborative learning and investigated the students' perceived learning and satisfaction in this course. The course design covered group work and individual work. The former functioned as a scaffolding activity to familiarize the students with not only how a certain type of analysis should be structured but also how the students interpreted and responded to the instructor's indirect corrective feedback. Each group-work writing project would go through a multi-drafting process, and the students would be guided to detect the weaknesses in their writing and learn how to improve their writing quality. Then the students would move on to individual writing, applying what they had acquired through course instruction, collaborative learning, and teacher feedback. Three data collection tools were employed: two surveys (one for perceived learning and one for course satisfaction) and an interview. The findings have revealed the students deemed this course design as highly effective, for the group-work learning environment (collaborative learning) boosted their confidence in understanding the writing genres and learning how to organize their ideas. Moreover, the multi-drafting writing process helped the students to know their strengths and weaknesses in composing technical reports.

Keywords

collaborative learning, technical writing, multi-drafting writing, teacher feedback