Limitations and Issues for Further Study - A Study on Interactive Writing Instruction for Japan

CHAPTER X Conclusion

10.3 Limitations and Issues for Further Study

In order to verify the effectiveness of Interactive Writing Instruction which integrates both top-down instruction and bottom-up instruction, this dissertation has described a series of experiments which have produced positive results. However, several limitations in the experiments should be noted although the experiments were designed and conducted as carefully as possible.

Firstly, all the experiments reported in this dissertation targeted Japanese EFL learners at the same public upper secondary school in Tokushima Prefecture although the participants in each experiment were different respectively as a group. The upper secondary school pupils who participated in the experiments can be considered as quite normal upper secondary school pupils in terms of their scholastic and English abilities since their school is not so heavily-oriented toward university entrance examinations. Actually, half of the graduates pursue jobs after graduation. In this sense, the results of the experiments reported in this dissertation have certain validity. However, it must be admitted that we should be careful in

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generalising the results of the experiments. In order to increase the validity of the results of the experiments, it is necessary to carry out more experiments targeting different groups of participants at different kinds of schools in the future.

Secondly, the method of instruction in Interactive Writing Instruction adopted for this dissertation was limited. As top-down instruction, only concept mapping was utilised while as bottom-up instruction keyword-based composition supported by Inter Japanese was utilised. It goes without saying that different methods should be possible for top-down instruction and for bottom-up instruction. We cannot deny the possibility that better results might have been obtained by methods different from the two methods adopted in this dissertation. It is worth conducting experiments using different methods in the future.

Thirdly, the provision or non-provision of feedback for free compositions written by the participants in this study may have influenced the results of the experiments in Chapters VIII and IX. In the questionnaire conducted after the treatment in the experiment reported in Chapter VIII, positive opinions on the feedback for pupils’ compositions were reported. It is probable that the feedback provided to the participants may have exerted a positive influence on the effectiveness of the treatment of the experiment. On the basis of this reflection, a decision was made to provide no feedback for the pupils’

compositions during the treatment in the experiments reported in Chapter IX in order to exclude possible influence of feedback. However, it seemed that the motivation of the participants decreased because of this decision, as was reported by the English teacher who conducted the treatment during the

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treatment. It is doubtful whether the participants were engaged in the post-test as they had been expected. This implies that feedback by a teachers or a conductor of the experiment cannot be ignored in experiments on English writing.

Lastly, the research design which was adopted in this dissertation was not ideal due to ethical problems. Ideally, there should have been four groups of participants in order to fully verily the effectiveness of Interactive Writing Instruction. The group of participants who would not receive any top-down instruction or bottom-up instruction, the group of participants who would receive only bottom-up instruction, the group of participants who would receive only top-down instruction and the group of participants who would receive both top-down instruction and bottom-up instruction. In the experiments in Chapters VIII and IX, only the third group and the fourth group were set up as the participants due to the practical difficulties at the school.

Although there are shortcomings in the research design of the present study as mentioned above, it can be said that Interactive Writing Instruction has considerable possibilities to improve writing by upper secondary school pupils in terms of quantity (fluency) and quality (accuracy). I really appreciate the cooperation of English teachers and pupils at the upper secondary school in Tokushima Prefecture who participated in this study. They allowed me to conduct a series of experiments on writing for five years. Without their understanding and cooperation, the experiments in this study were impossible.

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NOTES

CHAPTER I

(1)This study was conducted as part of the course named Pedagogical Empirical Studies offered by the Department of English Language Education of Naruto University of Education, and as a project at an upper secondary school which collaborated with this study for collaboration between the upper secondary school and the university.

(2) Concept mapping was adopted in a textbook of Japanese published by Mitsumura Tosho in 2000 and some textbooks for secondary schools published in 2012 are included concept mapping (cf. Chapter IV).

(3) Fluency is usually defined as “the ability to produce written and / or spoken language with ease” (Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p.204). Fluency in this study is measured by the quantity of writing within a certain amount of time. This means that the more sentences a learner can write within a certain amount of time, the more fluent writer he or she will be.

(4)The former Ministry of Education, Science and Culture was renamed as the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in 2001.

CHAPTER II

(1) In this study, L2 teaching means not only second language teaching but also foreign language teaching.

149 CHAPTER III

(1) It has been said that the first foreigner in Japan was William Adams (later Miura Anjin), who was a shipman from the Netherlands. He was drifted away and got to Usuki in Kyushu. He communicated with Japanese interpreters in Portuguese, which was a lingua-franca in those days. In those days interpreters of the government were not required to learn or use English.

Moreover, there are no stories or evidence that Anjin taught English to Japanese interpreters. That is the reason why foreign language education in Japan began after the incident of His Majesty’s Ship Phaeton.

(2) According to Deki (1994), English language education did not disappear but was continued even in the centre of militarism, the National Marine Academy.

(3) The objectives to be show below are indicated in the form of lists, summarising the objectives stipulated in the Courses of Study. The order of objectives was decided by the present researcher through understanding the exact phrases which stipulated the objectives in the Japanese language.

(4) This translation was retrieved on June 5th, 2013 from http://www.mext.go.

jp/a_menu/shotou/new-cs/youryou/eiyaku/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2011/04/11/1298 353_9.pdf

CHAPTER IV

(1)Li & Thompson (1976) and Schachter & Rutherford (1979), who followed the ideas of Li & Thompson (1976), insisted that Japanese belongs to the group of subject-predicate and topic-comment language. That is against the ideas that Japanese belongs to the group of topic-prominent language presented by Mikami (1960), Mori (1980) and Kanaya (2002). The present researcher doubts

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that Li and Thompson were familiar with the Japanese language sufficiently because they used the ungrammatical Japanese sample sentence in their study,

“Gakkoo-wa buku-ga isogasi-kat-ta”(p.462). Therefore, the idea that Japanese belongs to the group of topic prominent language presented by Mikami, Mori and Kanaya is adopted in this study.

CHAPTER VIII

(1)The quantity used in this chapter means the volume of compositions produced by the participants. It can be understood as the fluency of the compositions. The quality used in this chapter means the grammaticality of the compositions produced by the participants. It can be understood as the accuracy of the compositions.

(2)The words in the concept map presented to the participants were written in Japanese.

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Appendix A

ワークシートＦ

☆「自分の将来」についてマッピングしましょう！

自分の将来

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2007/06/13 7回目 6/14 (18)

クラス番号名前ワークシートＦ「自分の将来」について書いてみよう！

お助け集～将来編～

働く（就職する）・・get a job 収入・・・income

（一般的な）職業・・job, occupation （専門的な）職業・・profession

養護学校・・・school for disabled children 臨床心理士・・clinical phychology counselor 幼稚園・・・kindergarten （将来の）目標・・・goal

工学部・・・department of technology 大学での専攻・・major

マンション・・・condominium (mansion は大豪邸のこと☆ 分からない単語は和英辞書を使って調べましょう

162 ８回目 6/26

クラス番号名前ワークシートＧ「私と英語」について書いてみよう！

私と英語

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ワークシートＨ 2007/06/26

クラス番号名前

☆自分のワークシートを見ながら英語にしていこう！

『私と英語』について書きましょう。

☆ 分からない単語は和英辞書を使って調べましょう

164