How Does Perception of Self- and Peer Language Proficiency Affect Students' Interaction in Adult ESL Essay Writing?

CHAPTER 4

Result and Findings

Perception of Self- Language Proficiency

Turn analysis

Writing skills can be developed when the learners' interests are recognized and when they are exposed to situations where they can produce authentic piece of writing. The findings indicated that culture, identity and beliefs interacted together to reconstruct the learners' beliefs and identity on the basis of writing in particular and education in general. Thus, students' beliefs might be partially demonstrated by the kinds of strategies they employed when writing.

Tone analysis

Students usually bring their assumptions and beliefs about what a writing course should offer them and in what way. One of the most important points emerged from the data collected for this study was the students' misconception about their ability'. A number of students expressed that they were satisfied with their present writing skills while in fact they still needed to pay tremendous attention to this particular skill. This point needs to be investigated further in order to find out about the students' actual writing ability and identify the problems that they are facing while writing in English. Another key issue that needs to be looked at is students' meta-cognitive awareness of writing strategies and the actual strategies that they implement while writing. To sum up, the present study made a partial contribution to understand students' views and expectations about ESL writing, so that other studies need to be conducted to carefully investigate issues highlighted by the study such as the ones mentioned above.

Non-verbal behavior

When taking an academic writing course, students' main purpose is to learn to write effectively within their particular discipline and to succeed in their academic studies. Hence, students' needs, perceptions and present writing proficiency levels should be sought first in order to offer them the required assistance. Research on students' perceptions and beliefs has revealed that knowing students' perceptions and beliefs can play a crucial role in developing the right program to meet their needs.

Feedback taking

Students have their own attitudes and perceptions about the feedback they receive about their writing. Classroom context may play a vital role on the students' perceptions of teacher's feedback. Students may perceive feedback either as an effective or negative indicator of their learning. learners are always viewed as active participants who view all comments about their work as valuable, useful and helpful for their writing. Students are always positive about receiving teacher's feedback on their writing accuracy as they are eager to have their mistakes highlighted by the teacher. Studies carried out in the area of students' perceptions and preferences of the kinds of feedback, demonstrated that students possess very strong views about the types and amount of feedback offered by their teachers.

The overall results showed that the “givers”, who looked at other students' writing, made a considerable progress in improving their own writing during the semester. Nevertheless, this idea of 'givers' and 'receivers' will probably achieve its most fruitful objective if the trainee ...