Welcome to A Genre Approach to Teaching Argumentative Essays:
A Computer-Based Instructional Project for Enhancing ESL Students'
Essay Writing Strategies Using TOEFL's TWE Essays, an experimental
project of lesson plans which aim at teaching ESL students how to write
argumentative essays of no more than 500 words, as  required by TOEFL's
(Test of Englishas a Foreign Language) TWE (Test of Written English).

     The instructional materials of TOEFL's TWE essays are analyzed based
on the three progression patterns (parallel progression, sequential progression,
and extended parallel progression) in Topical Structure Analysis and Beverly
Derewianka's (1990) text organization in Argumentative Essay format.
This project is offered as a practical, concrete, and analytical guide for
ESL students as a way of constructing essays. Please bear in mind that this
project is not focused on grammar. If you are interested in grammatical
concerns, you may check UVic Writer's Guide  for yourself.

     The project was designed for the target groups of college (university) students
living off campus in Taiwan, with easy access to a personal computer at home.
And the institutional setting is the cram school in Taiwan delivering distance
education through CMC (Computer- Mediated Communication) technology.
For an observation survey on class experiment conducted in National Chung-
Hsing University in June, 1998, please refer to Observation Survey.

     This project is designed around one particular type of argumentative essay.
It is important to note that there are many ways of structuring argumentative
essays other than the one proposed in this project. (With regard to essay
patterns, please refer to essay patterns.)  However, the structure suggested
here in Writing TWE Argumentative Essays are regarded as effective and
efficient in terms of providing students with a very clear, easily accessible, and
efficiently effective lesson plans of cross reference for their own essays.

     We believe that using argumentative essay approach combined with
CMC can make the above target groups in Taiwan learn the EFL
writing in a very easily accessible, flexible and  interactive fashion.
It is easily accessible and flexible in that they have easy assess to the home
computers, with freedom from constraints of time and location; it is
interactive in that learners can ask questions, develop and take part in the
dialogue, receive new information from other learners or tutors. We
also believe that students using CMC activities in argumentative essays
can make significant improvements in TWE essay writing or at the very
least can make improvements in the communicative writing fluency by
means of argumentative essay culture combined with CMC technology.
 
     If you have any comments or questions about this project, please don't
hesitate to contact me at   [email protected] .

     The contents of this project and those of the floppy disk are separate
in form and in substance. The disk was made as of August 11th, 1998.
This project may be downloaded, printed and used for teaching and
learning purposes by educators, researchers, or students on condition that
the copyright is not to be removed from the bottom of each page, and the
source material quoted is properly acknowledged.
 
 

      Daniel Teng-Lung Peng, 1998