BLANK EXPOSITORY ESSAY GRAPHIC ORGANIZER Revised 2021
The study participants were one class of 38 SS2 students at the University of Nigeria Secondary School, Nsukka. The 38 students were exposed to graphic organisers and were administered essay tests pre- and post-exposure. Furthermore, the study employed a focus group for the case study. This focus group was sampled from the entire class using a purposive sampling technique. The study adopted a focus group because interviewing all the class members would be impossible or challenging. Therefore, purposive sampling was used to sample seven (7) students based on gender and academic achievement. Using the teachers’ records, the seven students were four male students and three female students. Two of the seven students were high achievers, another two were average achievers, and the last three were achievers. This sampling of these participants based on gender and academic achievement characteristics was done not to study their differences or similarities but to create an aggregate or all-encompassing view of the students. Also, seven students were selected because, according to Johnson and Christensen [], between six and twelve people are ideal participants for a focus group interview (FGI).
The data collection instruments were the Expository Essay Writing Achievement Test (EEWAT) and focus group interview. Two essay tests were adopted from the 2014 and 2015 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (Paper I) expository essay tests for Nigerian students. One was used as a pre-test, and the other was administered as a post-test. An equivalent form reliability index of 0.714 was obtained for the test. The instrument measured the student’s performance before and after using DGO charts. The test was scored following the WASSCE analytical method of grading essays: content = 10; organisation = 10; expression = 15; and mechanical accuracy = 5, a total of 40. A score of 20 (50%) of the total mark is the benchmark. A score of less than 20 indicates that the learner has lower writing skills, while a score of 20 and above indicates that the learner has higher writing skills. The total number of learners that scored less than 20 was determined. The scores of these learners in the post-test were compared with their scores in the pre-test after being exposed to DGO charts. The number of students that migrated from a lower writing skill to a higher writing skill and the percentage, given the sample, was determined. This number indicated the percentage of those with lower writing skills that migrated to higher writing skills.
Keywords: Graphic organisers, Digital graphic organisers, English language, Expository essay writing, Metacognitive strategy, Thematic analysis
Expository Essay Graphic Organizer
Students in Nigerian English language classrooms encounter difficulty in writing. However, the utilisation of metacognitive strategies has the potential to aid students in organising their thoughts during writing for better achievement. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of digital graphic organisers on secondary school students’ achievement in expository essay writing and the students’ perceptions of writing challenges and the impact of the strategy. The study adopted a mixed-methods research design consisting of a within-group experimental design and focus group interview. Five research questions and one hypothesis are formulated to guide the study. An intact class size of 38 students is the subject of the study, while an expository essay writing achievement test and a focus group interview were used for data collection. Percentage, mean and standard deviation, and thematic analysis were used in answering the research questions, while a paired sample t-test was used to test the null hypothesis at 0.05 significance. The study found a statistically significant difference between students' mean achievement scores before and after exposure to digital graphic organiser charts when writing expository essays.
As former secondary school English language teachers and WAEC examiners, we observed that students need help to compose well-structured essays during class writing exercises and examinations. Their essays are either characterised by vague ideas about the essay topic, incoherence, especially at the sentence and paragraph level or being markedly shorter than the expected number of words, which is clear evidence of a lack of ideas and how to develop them. The non-employment of teaching strategies by most Nigerian teachers may worsen these scenarios. They rely primarily on the traditional method, which is lecturing. However, research has somewhat demonstrated that metacognitive strategies might improve students’ writing abilities. Based on this perspective, the study would examine how the employment of digital graphic organisers, a metacognitive strategy, could impact on senior secondary school students’ academic achievement in an expository essay. Specifically, the study aims to answer the following questions.
Learners work on Part 1 of their end of unit assessment by creating an essay titled What Makes a Hurricane a Natural Disaster? They use glossaries and graphic organizers from previous lessons...
This is a great resource created by Scholastic for introductory essay writing. It has model essays and graphic organizers with sentence frames for the following genres of writing: narrative, descriptive, summaries, how-to-writing, persuasive, compare/contrast, cause & effect, and problem/solution.
Expository Essay Graphic Organizer
Scholars take a look at how the author of the model essay Elements of Mythology and Theme of Cronus moved up in the writing process from a graphic organizer to an essay.
Free writing-expository graphic organizers
There are different formats or types of digital graphic organisers, including cause-and-effect charts, compare-and-contrast charts, sequencing charts, persuasion charts, etc. (see , , , ). The cause-and-effect charts help students visualise the connection between a particular cause and its effect or the interrelationship between a problem and its primary causes, effects, and solutions. The compare-and-contrast organisers visually depict the similarities and differences between ideas or concepts. With this chart, the main ideas can be represented with supporting or opposing ideas. The ideas can further be compared or contrasted against one another. The sequence chart illustrates events. The chart can be used to outline actions from beginning to end. The actions can be represented top-down or left-to-right, connected by arrows. The persuasion chart allows students not only to identify evidence in support of their argument but also to acknowledge opposing opinions. (See Ref. [] for more samples of graphic organisers for teaching writing and other language skills). The students for this study will be exposed to different chart formats and guided on how to use them to write an excellent expository essay.
Expository Essay Graphic Organizer
Expository writing can be challenging for students, yet it is an important skill for them to develop and eventually master. Often, the most difficult aspects of writing an essay are getting started and maintaining an organized focus while drafting the essay. This Essay Map helps students with those challenges by providing them with an organized format that will help them generate and outline their ideas. When you introduce this graphic organizer to your students, model its use by creating an essay of a topic that is very familiar to students. Using a projector so students can watch, fill in the Essay Map as you brainstorm ideas. Then, show students how to use your completed Essay Map to generate a rough draft of an essay.
Expository Essay Brainstorming Graphic Organizer
DGO charts may be essential in expository essay writing. This is because they are “thinking technologies”. In an ESL classroom, student's writing and thinking abilities are examined through essay writing tests. Students who do not have strong writing skills will not be able to pass external examinations (WASSCE and NECO) since Paper 1, which tests writing ability, carries the most points (50%). Narrative, expository, descriptive, debate/argumentative essays, speeches, and articles are among the essay categories that students are assessed on. From the authors’ observations, students struggle to organise ideas when writing essays. For instance, in most narrative essays, the actions may end up not being well sequenced; in their expository essays, the effect or solution to a problem may be omitted. Such problems may be resolved if DGO charts are used as a thinking guide in the writing process.