Fostering EFL College Students’ Register Awareness: Writing Online Forum Posts and Traditional Essays

Ching-Fen Chang
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Ching-Fen Chang: National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching (IJCALLT), 2012, vol. 2, issue 3, 17-34

Abstract: This study explores 19 Taiwanese students’ writing in weekly online forum posts and traditional essays. Results drawn from discourse analysis of students’ writing in both types of writing tasks showed that the semester-long online writing accompanied by explicit instruction on essays and basic academic writing conventions appeared to help raise EFL students’ consciousness of register in the two writing contexts and help them make appropriate linguistic adjustments. Quantitative analysis using three measures of syntactic complexity revealed that the students tended to use syntactically more complex sentence structures in essays than in online forums. A number of typical informal or online linguistic features characterize the students’ online forums more frequently than in essays. Finally, although most of these EFL college students seemed able to take different approaches to online writing and essay writing at the end of the semester, some students adopted the same rigorous approach to both types of writing as a result of a strategic response to avoid losing face or being misunderstood when writing in a public domain. The results suggest that providing EFL learners a forum where they can express themselves in less formal language is beneficial.

Date: 2012
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