Reconceptualizing the Teaching of the Five-Paragraph Essay Through Concept-Based Language Instruction to English as a Second Language Writers
Abstract
This case study reports a pedagogical approach informed by Concept-Based Language Instruction, which aimed to orient English as a second language learners to a systematic conceptual understanding of rhetorical skills in five-paragraph essay writing. The 12-week pedagogical intervention focused on teaching the organizational structure of the five-paragraph essay and modes of persuasion through SCOBAs (Schemas for a Complete Orienting Basis of Actions) in a test preparation course for the writing tasks in the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Six participants completed three writing assignments and one analytic essay of a writing sample across the 12 weeks and received one-on-one individual tutoring sessions in the last week. The results demonstrate a holistic quality improvement in students’ five-paragraph essays and an observable improvement in the use of rhetorical appeals of Ethos and Logos strategies. In addition, the student-generated SCOBAs showed learners’ abilities to intentionally manipulate the SCOBAs to serve their internalization processes of the target concepts.