Effects of Problem-Based Learning on Chinese EFL Vocational College Undergraduates' Argumentative Writing Performance: A Quasi-Experimental Study
Abstract
chosen for the 14-week intervention, and one 1.5-hour lesson was organised every week. The research took some real CET-4 argumentative
writing questions. The CET-4 analytical rubric will be used to evaluate the three areas of content, structure and language of the writing. Two
trained raters were used to assess all the writing samples, and their inter-rater reliability was Cohen's Kappa = 0.86. The experimental group
was taught PBL-based writing instruction, and the control group was taught according to the traditional way. After writing the test results after
the intervention, it was found that the overall CET-4 writing performance of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the
control group (EG posttest mean M=10.020, SD=1.925; CG posttest mean M=5.990, SD=1.176). The difference between the two groups was
significantly larger; t(98)=12.635, p<.001 and Cohen's d=2.53. Multivariate analysis revealed that there were various differences in the components of the rubric, such as content, organisation and language, among the groups, and most of the partial eta-squared values were relatively
high (medium-to-large). The results show that PBL can enhance the argumentative writing ability of EFL learners in terms of the generation
of ideas, the organisation of arguments and language use, etc.
Keywords
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/wef.v4i3.9751
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