ERIC Number: EJ1320327
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Dec
Pages: 33
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0039-8322
EISSN: N/A
Degrees of Reasoning: Student Uptake of a Language-Focused Approach to Scaffolding Patterns of Logical Reasoning in the Case Analysis Genre
Mitchell, Thomas D.; Pessoa, Silvia; Gómez-Laich, María Pía; Maune, Michael
TESOL Quarterly: A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages and of Standard English as a Second Dialect, v55 n4 p1278-1310 Dec 2021
This study reports on student writing outcomes from a two-year interdisciplinary collaboration between applied linguists (the authors) and an organizational behavior (OB) professor. We used an ethnographic language-focused approach to make explicit the linguistic features of the case analysis genre at an American university in the Middle East. We analyzed 33 student case analyses to examine how effectively students applied two heuristics from our scaffolding materials: the "semantic wave" heuristic for writing analytical paragraphs that move from abstract to concrete and back to abstract knowledge; and the "I know," "I see," "I conclude" heuristic for making explicit the logical connections between disciplinary knowledge and case information to produce conclusions. Students integrated the focal linguistic features with varying degrees of effectiveness. Most students met genre expectations by making abstract claims about the case at the beginning and at the end of their analysis paragraphs, integrating OB knowledge with information about the case, thus creating effective waves between disciplinary and case knowledge. However, our analysis reveals differences in the quality of students' logical reasoning between high-, mid-, and low-rated texts. We discuss how these differences can inform linguistically responsive disciplinary writing instruction.
Descriptors: Writing (Composition), College Students, Applied Linguistics, Heuristics, Writing Evaluation, Semantics, Paragraph Composition, Case Studies, Writing Instruction, Case Method (Teaching Technique)
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2191/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A