Cognitive strategies of Turkish EFL university students during sentence -combining tasks

Abstract

ABSTRACT Title: Cognitive strategies of Turkish EFL university students during sentence-combining tasks Author: Şükran Özoğlu Thesis Chairperson: Ms» Patricia Brenner, Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program Committee Members: Dr. Arlene Clachar, Dr. Phyllis L. Lim, Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program This case study was designed to examine the cognitive strategies Turkish EFL students use during sentence- combining tasks in order to have a better understanding of what skills are required to produce a syntactically mature text. Six students studying at an English-medium university in Turkey participated in the study. in order to examine the cognitive strategies, think- aloud protocols of six subjects were audio-taped and transcribed. The transcriptions of the protocols were then segmented into communication units which were identified in a coding system developed by Johnson ( 1992 ). The results of the study showed that Turkish EFL students were most frequently engaged in the strategies of Higher-Level Planning (M = 10.08, S_D = 4.45), Restating Content 2 (M = 7.59, S_D = 2.63), Constructing Meaning 1 (M = 7.17, ŞD = 2.69) and Restating Content 1 (M = 6.67, SD = 1.63). This illustrates that the students spent most of their time trying to comprehend the given sentences in order to be able to produce their own texts. An attempt was also made to investigate whether the topic of a text dictated the cognitive strategies used during sentence-combining tasks. Topic 1 dealt with comparing a bicycle and a car and Topic 2 was asemiscientific subject about sound. The subjects were asked to manipulate the sentences of these topics to form cohesive paragraphs. The results showed that there was not a very distinct difference in the cognitive strategies used by the subjects with respect to familiarity of the topic. Nevertheless, it was indicated that the subjects used the strategies of Restating Content 1 (M = 8.67, SD = 1.63), which involved reading the text, and Constructing Meaning 1 (M = 8.50, ŞD = 2.69), which involved understanding the ideas in the text, more frequently with Topic 2 than they did with Topic 1. The relationship between the cognitive strategies and the language proficiency levels of the subjects was also investigated. The results did not show a clear-cut trend. It was observed that the subjects with different language proficiency scores exhibited mostly the same type of strategies during sentence-combining tasks. The only difference observed was that the subject with the lowest language proficiency score (60.0) used the strategies of Lower -Level Questioning (M = 3.0) and Evaluation (M = 4.5) much more frequently than the subjects with higher language proficiency. The study also aimed at examining the relationship between the cognitive strategies of ESL students studying at an American university in Johnson's (1992) study and EFL students in Turkey. In both of the studies, the results illustrated that ESL and EFL student writers most frequently use the strategies of Restating Content, Constructing Meaning and Higher-Level Planning during the same type of sentence-combining tasks.