Abstract

This is a two-part study that examined the effectiveness of introducing an authentic movie into paragraph writing instructions and how well students can assess their own writing through process writing. The study was conducted at a college of nursing in Japan. The research design was based on the hypothesis that introducing movies which have clear story lines can help the students write various types of discourse modes such as narrative, description and cause and effect. Also the study focused on students' self-assessment skills and its significance in improving their writing skills. The findings of the study are; (1) 85 percent of the students showed an improvement in their writing skills (2) 77 percent of the students rated their own writing objectively, while others either over or underestimated them. Based on the data, we concluded that (a) introducing a movie which had clear story lines and medical themes helped the nursing students to write well structured paragraphs (b) To facilitate students' self-assessing skills, we need to introduce different approaches such as giving more frequent feedback and detailed handouts with vocabulary and phrases.