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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.917-937
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 02 Sep 2022 Revised 20 Sep 2022 Accepted 30 Sep 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202210.917

Exploring the Attitudes of First-year ESL Students and Their Instructors toward Students’ Academic Writing Ability

Elizabeth Lee
Visiting Professor, Institute of Liberal Education Incheon National University 119 Academy-ro, Yeonsu-gu Incheon, Korea edl@inu.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

University-level ESL instructors play an important role in the development of students’ academic writing, and yet this is challenging due to different writing perceptions and attitudes instructors and students have developed over time. It is, therefore, useful to determine which gaps related to writing process, writing quality, and overall academic writing proficiency, must be bridged to enhance communication and understanding between students and instructors. This study seeks to investigate and compare the different attitudes held by students (n = 92) and instructors (n = 6) at two different ESL writing levels. Surveys and interviews were collected, and descriptive statistics, Welch’s one-way ANOVA, and Appraisal analysis were performed to analyze participants’ attitudes. Results indicated that students at both the lower- and intermediate-level were generally more positive than their course instructors in terms of assessing their writing process and arguments and details; and the group’s means differences were found to be statistically significant. Qualitative findings also showed that instructors were generally more critical and cautious in their assessment than students were of their academic writing ability. To resolve the misalignment, it is recommended that the importance of academic writing is discussed early in the semester.

Keywords:

attitudes, ESL students, first-year, academic writing, Appraisal

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