Integrating a Digital Concept Mapping into a Ppt Slide Writing Project

Carried out during a semester-long EFL (English as a foreign language) drama class, this research aimed to scrutinize the effects of digital concept mapping via LMS on English majors’ (N=38) PowerPoint (PPT) slide writing skills in Taiwan. Students were instructed to follow the concept mapping agenda via university learning management system (LMS), idea webbing, spider mapping, and network tree making to read and analyze the dramatic texts and to present their analysis on PPT slides. Thus, analytical reading input (digital concept mapping via LMS) was expected to lead an EFL writing output (PPT slide writing). Students were pre-tested, summative assesses, and post-tested using in-class PPT presentations. Results confirmed that analytical reading with digital concept mapping strategies taught by the researcher could solve EFL students’ PPT slide writing problems and improve their performance and the attainment of the task shares via LMS. The research offered a different perspective on teaching EFL writing with a specific focus on analytical reading to PPT slide writing and also implied the important consequence on analytical reading to analytical writing for future research. INTRODUCTION With the swift advancement in technology, many English teachers incorporate technology into their writing instruction. However, Zhang (2008) and Lin (2009) indicated that students have a more positive attitude in class with teacher’s feedback than without, since they consider their teacher’s advice more experienced and authoritative. After following the teacher’s suggestions, students’ final writing has been shown to improve in the criteria of content, organization, grammar and mechanics (Lin, 2009). Though both teachers of non-technology and technology assisted EFL writing claim their strategies are more effective than the other, the current research seeks no preference for either one, but to get the benefits from both. Chou and Hayes (2009) probed EFL writing studies from 1989 to 2008 and found that though writing and technology among elementary school children and university students were the most studied areas but none of the research stated the interest in logical or analytical skills. Writing, in most Taiwanese EFL education perspective, is taught as a linguistic skill for written communications not an academic literacy or literary skill for logic flows or analytical analysis to pinpoint the key points. The PowerPoint (PPT) presentation is a common oral report style at the university level which requires logical and analytical organization and accuracy of facts and wording. According to Badgett (1994), what the audience sees in the PowerPoint slides should be designed to supplement what presented or said (p.83). To help audiences distinctly grasp the wording problem is not allowed. Giving a PPT presentation in English can be a challenge for EFL English majors due to the spoken language proficiency but it is even more challenging for them because PPT slides are not text-heavy writing products. Instead, students need to write with a clear scenario that scopes the work and identifies the most important features, presents the logic flows and analytical literacy. Therefore, the present study combines the logic and analytical application for PPT slides writing with the importance of logical thinking ability in academic communication. PPT slides share structural similarities with concept maps that demand logical and analytical thinking as well as the ability to organize information (Mitchell, n.d.). PPT slide writing for academic purposes requires a specific writing style and structure and at the same time can be considered as analytical writing tool instead of a presentation slide show only. Students need to write with a clear scenario that scopes the work and identifies the most important features, presents the logic flows and analytical literacy, all of which are the main concerns of the current study. Hence, the current study proposed that applying concept maps to logical thinking with key points and reading will help students transform their literary analysis into a visual written representation. In order to investigate the effectiveness of concept maps for PPT slide writing, this study was implemented in an English drama course as opposed to a normal writing course. It integrates the process-related skills (planning and outlining the research PPT slides; writing the abstract and the slide drafts; revising and editing the slide drafts) with product-related skills (writing the final slide copy of the referred tasks and presenting them). TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology – July 2013, volume 12 issue 3