Redesigning pedagogy for Chinese writing: The multi-sensory approach

To help students who have difficulty in creative writing, it is important to redesign pedagogy to suit their needs. In redesigning pedagogy for average and lower-ability tertiary students, a multi-sensory approach to instruction on Chinese writing was tested in three associate degree classes (N = 100). The students were taught with the multi-sensory approach in writing Chinese essays in three distinct genres (i.e., descriptive, narrative, and expressive). The essays were assessed by three assessors: (a) the writer (i.e., the student himself or herself), (b) a peer, and (c) the teacher at 2 time points (i.e., before and after the instruction). A 2 (time) x 3 (genre) x 3 (assessor) repeated-measures analysis of variance found statistically significant main effects and also interaction effects. Overall, the approach improved students’ writing over time in all three writing genres. However, the effects were stronger for the expressive and descriptive genres and the students did not feel the improvement in writing in the narrative genre as strongly as they did in the other genres. To improve average and lower-ability students’ writing in Chinese, the multi-sensory approach may be helpful especially in the expressive and descriptive genres. Researchers and teachers of languages have been in search for effective ways to enhance the quantity and quality of students’ writing output (Foster & Skehan, 1996; Hudson & Bruckman, 2002; Kraetsch, 1981; Mehnert, 1998; Moran, 1988; Skehan & Foster, 1999; Wigglesworth, 1997). In teaching Chinese-speaking students to write in Chinese, conventional approaches often include modeling with clear instructions on the genre of the essay (Erbaugh, 1990; Jin, 2001; Zhu, 1997). In the present investigation, we tested a multi-sensory approach to enhancing students’ quality of writing. In assessing the students’ writing output, in addition to traditional teacher ratings, the writers of the passages themselves and their peers in the class also rated their written work. This process not only facilitated a sense of self-regulation (Winne & Perry, 2000)during the learning process but also provided some cross validation of the findings in the experimental study. The Multi-sensory Approach In the context of English language teaching, various approaches to improving students’ writing output have been tested. Of the many approaches, an interesting one that has been found to be useful is the multi-sensory approach (Hillocks & Kachur, 1979; Jampole, 1990; Nelson, 1976;