Mei-ching Ho
University of Taipei, Taiwan
About
Mei-ching Claire Ho is an Associate Professor of English Instruction at the University of Taipei, Taiwan. Her research interests include second language writing, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. She has published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes, System, CALICO Journal, and Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.Sessions
Poster Session Exploring the interplay between lexical frames and rhetorical move-steps in grant abstracts: A computer-assisted corpus analysis more
Grant writing is a critical academic endeavor across disciplines, yet the grant genre remains less explored due to its restricted accessibility. Existing research has primarily examined grant proposals based on limited datasets, with little focus on their phraseological features. Among these features are lexical frames, or discontinuous multi-word sequences (e.g., to * the impact of), often regarded as “important building blocks in discourse” (Biber & Barbieri, 2007, p. 270). However, no published studies have analyzed how lexical frames function in the rhetorical move-steps of grant proposal abstracts (GPAs). This study addresses this gap by exploring the form-function connection in GPAs across three social science disciplines (i.e., Anthropology, Linguistics, and Sociology) and analyzing variations in the distribution and use of recurrent frames and move-steps. Our dataset consists of 1,500 GPAs from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant recipients in the U.S. All texts were annotated for rhetorical move-steps, using a coding scheme adapted from Cotos (2019) and Lu et al., (2021). A corpus-driven analytic approach was used to extract frequently occurring 5-word frames. The results revealed significant disciplinary differences in both the distribution of rhetorical move-steps and the lexical frames used to realize them. Implications for discipline-specific grant writing pedagogy are discussed.
Presentation Integrating synchronous audio-visual and e-written feedback in EFL writing more
Despite the utility of synchronous audio-visual feedback in ESL/EFL writing classes, its effectiveness when combined with other feedback types remains unclear, as findings from existing studies are mixed (e.g., Cavaleri et al., 2019). Furthermore, no previous studies have examined how the combination of synchronous screencasting and word processing technologies influences teacher feedback (Wood, 2023). This study explored the effects of combining synchronous audio-visual feedback with electronic/e-written comments on the focus and manner of feedback, student uptake of feedback, and their perceptions. The data collected from 18 Taiwanese EFL college students’ writing, revisions, screencast recordings, and interviews were analyzed. Results revealed that synchronous screencasts generated significantly more content-oriented feedback and metalinguistic comments compared to the asynchronous mode. The combined feedback approach was highly effective in promoting student revisions with successful uptake rates exceeding 74%. However, the effectiveness of feedback features varied depending on the mode used. Students indicated a preference for synchronous audio-visual feedback as it enabled them to take an agentic role in negotiating feedback and revision directions. Additionally, their preferences appeared to be influenced by the complexity and type of writing tasks. Pedagogical insights into the impact and effectiveness of a combined feedback approach in process-oriented writing are discussed.