| dc.description.abstract | For EFL writing, non-native English learners have big challenges to break through like how to stimulate their motivation to write more and meaningful content and how to guide them organize their writing well. After literature review, there is not much research concentrated on this issue. Particularly for elementary school students, because they have only basic English ability, it finds EFL writing is very difficult for them. Therefore, this study proposed to employ one computer vision technology, which is image-to-text recognition, to augment English writing in authentic contexts for elementary school students by providing related vocabularies and phrases to motivate their writing interests. Furthermore, writing scaffoldings were also applied to guide them to conduct writing English. In the study, a learning system – Authentic EFL Writing (AuthWrite) is designed with image-to-text recognition (ITR) to generate various vocabularies (nouns and adjectives) and phrases (independent clauses) related to context content surrounding of the learner. Importantly, a scaffolding is also added to support learners to improve EFL learners’ writing quality and organization. In term of pedagogical aspect, the mechanism of using ITR in authentic context not only leaves EFL writers with real presence in real and right context but also provides for them with the contents related to writing topics. The above combination is helpful for learner to practice EFL writing more efficiently and conveniently.
One experiment was conducted for eight weeks at an elementary school for forty-six participants, including 23 students for experimental group and 23 ones for control group. After the experiment, the result shows that our AuthWrite not only has significant influences on improving English writing of experimental group in the six criteria of qualitative aspect of an English writing including Ideas and content, Organization, Voice and tone, Word choice, Sentence fluency, and Convention but also has positive effects on several quantitative variables in post-test such as Nouns, Verbs, Prepositions, Sentence patterns, Introduction sentence, Body sentences as well. More importantly, it was found that experimental group could improve students in using various nouns, verbs, and prepositions in theirs’ paragraphs. Our AuthWrite really helps students making sentences fluently with various nouns and adjectives. Especially, the improvement of using nouns in the experimental group was statistically significant. Furthermore, our proposed scaffolding can also be applied to facilitate their EFL writing in structure of a paragraph (introduction sentence (s), body sentences), sentence patterns, verbs, and prepositions as well. However, according our statistical analysis, we found that a lot of images or many difficult English vocabularies/phrases were provided with children made them confuse and ignore to use. Therefore, a suggestion of using AuthWrite can be considered to be useful for EFL writing of elementary school students in authentic context because they can obtain lots of proper vocabularies and phrases related to writing topics from ITR in authentic contexts. | en_US |