Abstract:

The paper deals with innovations of teaching in the field of essay writing skills development for the students majoring in linguistics. The key issue is how to introduce into the classroom the new methods widely discussed nowadays not only to save teachers’ efforts but mainly to improve learning outcomes, thus making the educational process optimal. Furthermore, academic writing is commonly considered one of the most challenging skills to develop and to introduce new technologies into. It is questionable, how contemporary teaching methods affect this productive skill while not being a mere substitution of what can be done without any ‘innovative’ interference. So, the objective of the research is to propose an optimal win-win combination of the traditional and innovative methods available to develop essay writing skills essential for future linguists.

To address the objective, the authors analysed recent papers in terms of new methods in language teaching and developing essay writing skills in particular. Then they designed and implemented an essay writing course that included the following innovations: blended learning, communicative approach and automatic peer review. Traditionally the students were required to read a lot before starting writing; they were given the structures and algorithms of various essay types, writing procedures and assessment; besides, the authors asked to hand in the final drafts in the handwritten format. The experimental group of students consisted of the second-year undergraduates majoring in linguistics at the South Ural State University, Russia.

To evaluate learning outcomes, the authors compared the quality of the final drafts written by the students of the experimental group and the ones from the group taught essay writing skills in a traditional format, without including innovative methods. The latter also comprised the second-year undergraduates majoring in linguistics, so that the conditions were comparable.

As a result, the students from the experimental group showed deeper understanding of the writing prompts and better use of the structures. Besides, a systematic peer review procedure helped to enhance the ability to assess and give valuable feedback. Thus, the obtained results proved that the proposed methods are optimal because they work well both to optimize teachers’ work load and to achieve better outcomes. However, there are certain limitations mostly connected with using automatic peer review as it requires the tool itself, the skill to work with it both for a teacher and for students, especially if they do not have any experience of assessing their peers.

Keywords:

Optimal methods, essay writing, innovations, teaching writing skills, learning outcomes, linguistics.