2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Academic writing is difficult, especially for multilingual writers (for whom English is an additional language). As Engineering continues to enjoy the top place of choice for first-time international doctoral enrollment in the U.S., the need to develop course-level writing support for multilingual engineering students to excel in publication has become increasingly important. However, the difficulty in mastering disciplinary discourse is beyond learning what rhetorical expectations have to be met but how to leverage English in discipline-appropriate ways to accomplish them, something they were not enculturated when entering the doctoral program. In this respect, this paper reports the design and effectiveness of a tutoring intervention to four multilingual doctoral students. My goal is to improve students’ writing by introducing a language module that can be distributed by instructors as handouts and video tutorials to students in a writing for journal publication course in Mechanical Engineering.
The tutoring design is innovative in three ways. First, pedagogical materials are devised based on a comparative analysis of published research articles (150 texts) and previous student deliverables (32 texts). This combination makes teaching more purposeful since it targets divergence in language use arising from student-expert comparison. Second, instances observed to interfere effective communication were packaged into four linguistic concepts: types of clausal structures, effective sentence structures, information flow and cohesion, making appropriate claims, plus an introductory session and a summary session, totaling six 1.5-hour weekly tutoring sessions. Third, it draws theoretical insights from corpus-based writing instruction in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Concept-Based Language Instruction (C-BLI), a widely used pedagogy grounded in Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory in second language education to better meet the needs and interest of multilingual engineering students in discipline-specific writing.
Each session begins with a lecture on a linguistic concept, followed by a student practice of the given concept using excerpts from the expert writing and a step-by-step query practice of the given concept using corpus tools, and ends with a student-centered self-exploration of such concept in their own writing.
Throughout tutoring, student deliverables (literature review and to-be-published manuscript) containing revisions overtime, and an exit questionnaire reporting their learning experience in and evaluation of the tutoring design were collected. To assess the pedagogical effectiveness, revisions made at the sentence level between drafts and analyzed students’ comments were compared. This examination forged a well-informed end-of-session interview with each participant by asking specifically why they made particular linguistic choice in a particular textual environment and how the linguistic concepts and data queries helped or not helped facilitate that.
Student comments reveal how advanced multilingual writers (1) articulate effective linguistic choices to each other, (2) identify the conventions of sentence-level features in Mechanical Engineering and (3) apply corpus information to more effectively revising their own writing. I conclude with challenges and a discussion of the possibility of leveraging corpus tools to teach discipline-appropriate grammar mechanics.