EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF PROJECT-COMPUTER TECHNIQUE FOR TEACHING ENGLISH ACADEMIC WRITING TO STUDENTS OF LINGUISTIC TERTIARY SCHOOL

Abstract

The article is devoted to discussing the organization of and implementing an experimental study of the project-computer technique for teaching English academic writing to students of linguistic tertiary schools. In the study English academic writing was being taught using the genre of academic essays in three subgenres: “personal opinion,” “for and against,” “problems and solutions.” The developed projectcomputer technique itself is based on combining project tasks for gaining command of English academic writing with completing those tasks by way of using computer technology in general and the Internet in particular. Twelve stages (analyzed in the article) of forming English academic writing skills underlie the elaborated project-computer technique. The efficiency of that technique was tested in a long-term (two year-long) experimental study, and the methodology of conducting it, as well as the methodology of assessing students’ English academic writing skills are discussed in detail in the article. The experimental research gave grounds for the conclusion that, thanks to the use of project-computer technique, the experimental groups students always achieve the expected level of communicative competence in writing even surpassing it, approaching the level B2+ and even reaching beyond it instead of the level B2 at the end of the second year of their studies and at the end of the third year surpassing the level C1+ and very closely approaching the level C2. Unlike that, the students from the control groups, although they approach the level B2 by the end of their second year of studies and the level C1 by the end of the third year, do not fully reach it and never surpass it in what concerns the development of their communicative competence in writing. Therefore, the high practical efficiency of the developed technique was experimentally proven

Keywords

• linguistic tertiary school
• teaching english academic writing
• project-computer technique
• experimental study
• experimental proofs of the efficiency of the developed project-computer technique