A New Approach to English Writing Class for Nursing Students Using a Movie

抄録

To be competitive in our present internationalized world, Japanese college students need to acquire adequate writing skills to prepare themselves for real situations; writing reports and papers. For this reason, it is essential that they have a basic understanding of paragraph writing structuring. Instructions on writing that Japanese students have received up to high school level, however, are mainly short composition exercises and sentence level translations from Japanese into English. In one approach to teach English writing, we introduced a movie related to the students' special field to raise their motivation and to promote the understanding of various discourse modes such as narratives, problem solving, contrast and personal opinion. Our main focus was to investigate: 1. Whether movie-based writing instruction is effective in improving the students' writing skills. 2. Whether there are any differences in progress among students of different English writing skills. Although the questionnaire result suggested that the students received the instruction favorably, there is some room for improvement as to the presentation of the movie material.