On the Aspects of Skills for Procedural Expository Writing

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine factors that influence writing abilities for comprehensible expository texts. It is important for writing these types of texts both to have enough prior knowledge about the topic and to know the learner's levels of knowledge. Therefore, this study investigated the relationship between them. In the preliminary experiment, to select valid criteria for evaluating the comprehensibility of expository texts, procedural and declarative texts were evaluated in terms of their comprehensibility by 38 students. As results, four evaluating items were selected. In the main experiment, 28 students were first asked to write expository texts about "How to play tennis". Half of the students were experienced in tennis (E-group) and the other students were novice (N-group). E-group subjects were asked questions from a novice about content of the texts written by themselves. Then, they rewrote the texts. After a second writing session, another 20 students were asked to evaluate the comprehensibility of the whole 42 texts. Results were as follows : E-group's first writings lacked some important rules for playing tennis, and the levels of comprehensibility were lower than the N-group's. But E group's second writings were improved in the respects of important rules and comprehensibility. All these things made it clear that experience in knowing levels of knowledge about readers were effective ways to improve writer skill.