The impact of a visual approach used in the teaching of grammar when embedded into writing instruction : a study on the writing development of Chinese first year university students in a British university in China
Born into a visual culture, todayâs generation of learners generally prefer a visually-rich multimodal learning environment. Tapping into the potential of visuals in language pedagogy, this study was aimed at discovering the impact of a visual presentation of grammatical concepts related to sentence structure on student writing. The study used a mixed methods design to analyse the impact of the visual approach first by statistically measuring sentence variety and syntactic complexity of student pre and post intervention texts and then using interviews to explain the nature of the impact of visuals on student conceptual understanding and its effect on their writing development. Statistical findings reveal that the experimental groups of Chinese students who were taught grammatical concepts in the context of writing instruction using a visual approach outperformed the students in the control groups who were given similar lessons in the context of writing instruction but using traditional printed hand-outs. Qualitative findings suggest that the visuals seems to have increased these studentsâ conceptual understanding of grammatical items that were taught, and this resulted in more sophisticated and syntactically
Gaikwad, Vinita
Second Language Acquisition ; Writing ; Writing ; Contextualized Teaching of Grammar ; Grammar and Writing Development ; Writing Development ; Second Language Acquisition ; Visualization ; Multimodal Learning ; Grammar Teaching ; Grammar and Writing in China ; External and Internal Visualization ; Visual imagery in grammar teaching ; language pedagogy
The impact of a visual approach used in the teaching of grammar when embedded into writing instruction : a study on the writing development of Chinese first year university students in a British university in China. Born into a visual culture, todayâs generation of learners generally prefer a visually-rich multimodal learning environment. Tapping into the potential of visuals in language pedagogy, this study was aimed at discovering the impact of a visual presentation of grammatical concepts related to sentence structure on student writing. The study used a mixed methods design to analyse the impact of the visual approach first by statistically measuring sentence variety and syntactic complexity of student pre and post intervention texts and then using interviews to explain the nature of the impact of visuals on student conceptual understanding and its effect on their writing development. Statistical findings reveal that the experimental groups of Chinese students who were taught grammatical concepts in the context of writing instruction using a visual approach outperformed the students in the control groups who were given similar lessons in the context of writing instruction but using traditional printed hand-outs. Qualitative findings suggest that the visuals seems to have increased these studentsâ conceptual understanding of grammatical items that were taught, and this resulted in more sophisticated and syntactically
impact visual use teach_grammar embed write instruction study write development university_student british_university china born visual_culture today generation learner generally prefer visually rich multimodal learn_environment potential language pedagogy study aim_discover impact visual presentation grammatical concept related sentence_structure student_writing study use mixed_method design analyse impact visual first statistically measure sentence variety syntactic complexity student pre post intervention text use interview explain nature impact student conceptual effect write development statistical finding_reveal experimental_group chinese_student taught grammatical concept context write instruction use visual student control_group give similar lesson context write instruction use traditional printed hand qualitative finding_suggest seem increased student conceptual grammatical item teach result sophisticated syntactically