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