Academic Writing

an intervention study with upper secondary school students

Abstract

This article describes an intervention study with Swedish upper secondary students where the potential of visualizing text linguistic variables connected to academic writing was tested. Model texts were used to discuss grammatical constructions, linguistic choices and specific vocabulary through dialogic talk to increase the students’ metalinguistic awareness (Fang & Park 2019; Myhill 2018). Students from five preparatory classes participated in the study and two classes joined the intervention in three lessons distributed over two weeks. Initially, all students wrote an assignment as a pretest. It was oriented towards the explanatory text type and constructed to resemble the Swedish National Test Essays which are recurrent in primary and secondary school. In the treatment group, where students as well as teachers participated, the focus was on metalinguistic understanding in text-typical features by examining patterns of academic language (Hyland, 2016; Myhill, Jones & Lines 2018; Rothery 1994). Lexical profiles, which displays the words in colours related to frequency, were also used (Anthony 2021). Finally, the students in both groups were asked to revise their pretest essays as a posttest (N=74). The analyses focus on long words, word variation index, verbs in the passive tense, high- and low frequency words and also text length to include a baseline for comparisons of lexical density. The quantitative results show a significant increase for the students in the treatment group (n=28) for five of the six variables compared to the students in the control group (n=46). The qualitative data is presented as some students´ texts and statements.